Is it possible to determine the pore water distribution or to visualise the pore water in a mudrock or shale with an environmental scanning electron microscope?
I do not think it is possible.
To see pore in ESEM you need to fracture your specimen, i.e. you need to open the pore to the environment. In ESEM you cannot keep specimen at exactly the same condition as after fracture. You will either let it dry or let it absorb more water.
As Vladimir said, you need to open it somehow.
Maybe you can try a microtome inside the chamber and try to cut it there and observe. But it is tricky - microtome can cause cutting artifacts because of fragility of the sample.
Other tricky part is to keep the same amount of water inside your sample. You have to keep precize conditions inside your microscope otherwise more water will condense or the water will be continuously vaporizing.
You will need to try Cryo-SEM I think. You can use ESEM to see how water moves through pores by capillary action, or do wettability, wetting and drying, but no chance of seeing original pore waters...
@James Oliver Buckman
But there will be no capillary action in open (for observation) capillary.
You can observe water passing through the pore network and coming out of the pores on the surface, coating the pore walls.... We have done this on a number of occasions
I agree, cryo would work best. Have a look at the work of Herbert Juling in Bremen. Such as: Steiger, Michael et al. “Hydration of MgSO4.H2O and Generation of Stress in Porous Materials.” Crystal Growth & Design 8.1 (2008): 336–343. ESEM is great for visualizing processes (see link for my clips)
http://www.conservationsciences.org/Conservation_Sciences/Clips.html
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