If I asked you if you wanted some cinnabar, what would you expect? Maybe some warm, delicious pastry filled with cinnamon and loaded with icing and emitting a scrumptious odor that makes your nose scream with anticipation. That sounds about right- yes?
Nope. The smell of cinnabar actually has a fair chance of killing you. This is cinnabar:
Cinnabar is HgS (Mercury Sulfide). A crystal mined in only a handful of mines across the world including Almaden, Spain; where the ore is so thick in mercury that back in the 1600’s when this stuff was mined by criminals of the Spanish empire, the heat from the torches and hard working warm bodies caused the metal to literally perspire and drip from the walls and ceilings of the mine.
Known as quick silver at the time, the mercury was used for everything from forming tophats, to lighthouse upkeep.
In fact, 24% of the the workers sent to the mine died of mercury poisoning before their sentence came to an end. Now here comes the cool part. Mercury is a deadly poison, yet only in certain forms. Pure elemental mercury, in a liquid state is harmless to touch, which is why you see the picture above of a hand letting it drip off into a petri dish. Where when Mercury is in it’s gaseous form, it is toxic to inhale, and methyl-mercury (CH3Hg) is poisonous to humans, with most casualties being from biomagnification of methyl-mercury up the food chain from algae, to small fish, to bigger fish, to our dinner plate.