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Environmental science

Arsenic meets dense populations

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 494–496 (2008)Cite this article

In the South Asian lowlands, high population density coincides with dangerous levels of arsenic in groundwater. Maps based on surface geology can help identify regions at risk of arsenic contamination.

Across floodplains of the Bengal Basin, groundwater is pumped by millions of private tubewells from water-logged sand deposits. The first signs of trouble appeared in the 1980s when K. C. Saha of the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Kolkata was shown skin lesions by numerous villagers from the Indian state of West Bengal and linked these to the high arsenic content of groundwater from shallow aquifers2. It took another decade of heroic efforts before government and international organizations recognized that natural contamination of tubewells with arsenic was a problem of even greater magnitude in Bangladesh3.

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Figure 1: Population and arsenic risk in South Asia.

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  1. Alexander van Geen is at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964, USA. avangeen@ldeo.columbia.edu,

    Alexander van Geen

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van Geen, A. Arsenic meets dense populations. Nature Geosci 1, 494–496 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo268

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