Soluble and bacterial Iron in your water can cause blockages to pipes, discolour leaves and reduce photosynthesis efficiency if used for irrigation.
Iron is a common problem in water in many places and levels as low as 0.1mg/L (0.1 ppm) can cause blockage problems, especially with drip irrigation systems.
If you have an iron issue in your water supply, you can treat it by filtration or aeration to remove the iron particles.
The Santorini island group (Greece) in the southern Aegean Sea is renowned for its volcanic phenomena. A violent eruption some 3,600 years ago covered the original island with a thick layer of pumice and created a flooded caldera.
Hot fumarolic exhalations that contain sulphur dioxide persist to the present day and have resulted in an aggressive environment that leaches numerous elements, among them iron, from the rocks constituting these islands.
If such exhalations emerge into the cool and more or less neutral submarine environment, selected precipitation of the leached components will take place.
The most spectacular of these precipitates is an up to 3 meter thick ochreous deposit that has accumulated in a narrow bay on Palea Kameni. The upper, oxidized zone of this deposit is of a striking rusty, yellow-brown colour and consists mainly of the iron oxyhydroxides, goethite and ferrihydrite, as well as siderite, an iron carbonate. The locals used to shy away from this bay, but in the age of international tourism, the sediment is now touted as a “warm therapeutic mud.”
