All the Discovered Gold in the World (in one chart)

Source - Visual Capitalist

The source of this graphic - Kalo Gold - appears to be a gold speculation company focusing on Fiji and British Columbia. I haven't the foggiest idea whether they're a reputable company or some sort of scammers' paradise.

I do know that I like their inforgraphic on where the gold in the world currently is - both above and underground.

Long term, I wonder when it'll become profitable to mine for gold in our landfills - especially the last few years' layers including electronic equipment.

Montana city formerly the most polluted in the country turning a corner

I've been to Butte, MT and stood in the shadow of that smelter smokestack. 

The legacy of mining in Butte is...complicated. 

Clearly the city wouldn't be what it is without its mining past. The richest hill on Earth made this city - at one time, not now - the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco.

But that same mining industry poisoned the land all around that hill, pumping the products of the smelter as high and far as possible from that giant smokestack.

I've posted about the EPA-lead cleanup from the mining industry before, and apparently Anaconda, MT is happy with how the cleanup is going, but it sounds like some of the folks in Butte aren't so happy.

All the metal we mined in 2022

Source - VisualCapitalist

"What yours is mined." ~ tagline on magnets from the College of Earth and Mine Sciences at the University of Utah

I don't have much to add to today's infographic other than it's amazing to me how much more iron ore we mined than all the other metals combined.

High demand and prices for lithium send mines into overdrive

Source - NPR article

We need lithium.

We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.

I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.

Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you had some students who would be helped by reading along - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine.

The history and future of Butte, Montana

I was lucky enough to teach one of our summer teacher ASM camps in Butte, Montana - at Montana Tech - the first time that city held such a camp. My time in Butte was great, and I am thrilled to have been able to visit Berkley Pit, a major feature in today's video.

This video is slightly about the history of Butte's mining industry but much more about the revitalization of the city's environment and the reclaiming of the environment around such a huge mining operation. 

There's a huge amount of clean-up to be done, but they've come a long, long way from a city surrounded by barren hillsides with the US's tallest free-standing masonry structure, one designed to spread the 75 tons of arsenic-laden dust produced daily a little further from the smelter. 

How To Make Paint From Pollution | World Wide Waste

It's always good to see somebody turning toxic waste into something useful and doing some good for the environment in the process, but it's pretty clear that unless they scale this up to massive size, they're never going to be making more than a drop in the acid mine drainage (AMD) coming out of even this one mine in southeastern Ohio.

I'm kind of tempted to buy their paints even though I don't paint. I guess I'd give it to one of my art teachers and let them use it with their students. I just want to help out the cause in a little way even. I guess I could donate, but I can't figure out how to do that from John Sabraw's webpage. He says you can donate to it, but I can't find the choice he says to make in the drop down.

It's a pile of mining waste. Want to go skiing on it?

Typically mining tailing piles are not destinations to see.

They're usually filled with heavy metals and lots of other pollutants, but this pile is mostly inert sand...and it's an off-season ski slop.

That's pretty cool. 

The Toxic Pit With A $3 Admission Fee

Hey, I've been there!

And I've written about it, too.

Berkeley Pit is fascinating as a legacy of the environmental consequences of mining - particularly of open pit mining - and a roadside attraction that you can see for a scant $3 admission fee.

Tom Scott - whose YouTube channel is mostly fascinating explorations of Tom's many interests (languages, computer technology, "Things You Might Not Know", and a couple of 'shows' that I should probably check out) - makes a stop at The Pit in the above video and gets a lot closer to the water than I was ever allowed to go - or than I really tried to go, honestly.

He visits the propane cannon used to scare off birds, sees the high-powered rifles used for the same, and sees one of the world's largest water treatment plants - only to be fully online once the water level within The Pit equalizes with the water table outside The Pit and the toxic, sulfuric-acidic water begins to leave The Pit.

I did fact check one detail of the video -  at 0:29 when Tom says "and so deep you could fit the new One World Trade Center standing upright in it."

According to Wikipedia (citation needed), the approximate depth of The Pit (I really like capitalizing both words there) is 1780 feet. According to Wikipedia again, One World Trade Center's architectural height is 1776 feet, but the height to the tip of the antenna on top is 1792 feet.

So, looks like Tom is approximately right, but the tip might extend just a bit above the surface.

I wonder what the water (pH~2.4) would do to the building?

Risk List 2015

I'll readily admit that I'm not 100% sure that I understand what rare earth elements are all about. While driving around on vacation, I listened to most of this On Point radio show about them, and I'm still a bit dodgy about which elements they are, why they're useful to us, and why the heck China apparently owns all of them.

What I do know, however, is that loads of politicians and talking heads say that rare earth elements are desperately important to loads of our defense and manufacturing sectors and that China apparently has the entire world of rare earth elements in the palm of their hand.

So says that 2015 Risk List, ranking the relative risks to our supply chains from disruptions in various element production.

What I do know is that we need to get us some of that there reform.

Source - http://www.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=3075 

Naica - Return to the Giant Crystal Cave

The famous crystal cave of Naica was first discovered in 2000, and scientists have been trying to study the massive gypsum crystals found there ever since.

National Geographic originally produced a program Deadly Crystal Cave and has now produced a follow-up program titled Return to the Giant Crystal Cave (seen above).

In this version, a mostly new team of scientists continues exploring the cave, finding ways to spend longer times in the cave while exploring to greater depths and testing some of the theories that the first team of scientists developed. There is also a team of spelunkers checking out a possible new cave found off of a newly-drilled air shaft into the mine.

We again get told that the main crystal cave will be allowed to refill and the crystals to begin growing again but without any specifics as to when that might happen.

EPA says it released 3 million tons of contaminated water into river

That's not how the Animas River should look.

No, this is how the Animas River should look.

But then, as the post title says, the EPA released 3 million tons of contaminated water in the Animas River...accidentally, at least.

Another article, this by the Washington Post, does a nice job explaining just what was happening when the accident happened...

When underground water runs through a mine, it picks up traces of the minerals that are buried there, explains Colorado Public Radio station KUNC. When it mixes with mineral pyrite, it reacts with air to form sulfuric acid and dissolved iron. It also picks up other heavy metals, like copper and lead, as well as any of the chemicals that miners have been using to extract the resources. By the time it trickles out of the mountain and into nearby waterways, it’s an acidic, often-toxic brew.

...

The Animas River Stakeholders Group that was set up to deal with the issue after the mines were closed, which includes Sunnyside Gold Corp., didn’t have the estimated $12 million to $15 million it would take to treat the contaminated runoff. And for years, Silverton residents resisted EPA involvement out of fear that the “Superfund” label given to the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites would jeopardize the tourism industry — the only source of income that could replace the vanished mines. A few even hoped that the mines would reopen one day.

Meanwhile supporters of EPA intervention accused Sunnyside of stonewalling the cleanup attempt to avoid liability.

The two sides reached an agreement of sorts this year. The mines would not be designated a Superfund site, and the EPA would provide $1.5 billion to plug the problematic Red and Bonita mine, where polluted water drained at a rate of 500 gallons per minute, according to the Durango Herald.
But water has a habit of finding its way downhill, and plugging one mine often means it simply leaks from others, so the agency had to excavate and stabilize the Gold King mine upstream.
That’s what they were up to on Aug. 5, when the loose material holding the mine together finally gave way. The water that had accumulated in the mine’s long-abandoned tunnels went tumbling into Cement Creek.

“It was known that there was a pool of water back in the mine, and EPA had a plan to remove that water and treat it, you know, slowly,” Peter Butler, who serves as a co-coordinator of the stakeholders group, told KUNC. “But things didn’t go quite the way they planned and there was a lot more water in there than they thought, and it just kind of burst out of the mine.”

And there you go..."it just kind of burst out of the mine."

I've written about the remnants of mining before and was lucky enough to see how it's dealt with at Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, particularly in the Silver Bow Creek area.

In the long run the scars left by our mining sites are going to take a very long time to heal, but it's tough to ever look at not mining because we need what's in those hills.

That being said, often times it's even tougher to look at the consequences of our mining.

If We Want to Keep the Gadgets Coming, Let's Mine Greenland

We need heavy metals. Without the continued influx of Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Kiss, and others like them, our supply of disaffected, midwestern teenage boys may dry up at any time.

(I'm sorry, but I swear that I'm contractually obligated to tell a corny joke at the beginning of every post. Them's the rules.)

This Wired article from February, 2015 opens by explaining the usefulness of many of the rare earth metals (or lanthanides as they point out) and then to point out that current Chinese supplies look to run out soon, America's supply isn't profitable right now, Australia's deposits need to find a refiner, but Greeland's deposit, the second largest in the world, is sitting right there under 1.3 miles of ice.

The article also points out that Denmark's environmental stewardship record would give us hope that the mining would be done in as environmentally friendly way as possible.

I doubt the last paragraph's assertion, however, that, "There are no native populations to displace, no salmon runs to despoil." The macrofauna under the ice may be minimal to nonexistant, but I would venture to wager that the microfauna is pretty well balanced there under the ice sheet.

Until then, I'll go for the fist of rock with lead.

Butte, America (part 2 - Montana Resources)

When last we left our intrepid explorers, they had seen the eventual outcome of the strip mining of copper, a toxic-water-filled pit.

Today our scene opens on the pit to the east of Berkeley Pit in the creatively named East Pit (or the Continental Pit according to Wikipedia) where copper and molybdenum ore is still being mined, ground, and purified by Montana Resources who were nice enough to host our teacher camp participants for a field trip. Big, big, big thanks to Tad Dale and the folks at Montana Resources. They were great hosts.

Check out their video of the processes at the pit.


Montana Resources module SD from Washington Corporations on Vimeo.

We started toward the end of the process, in the grinding and flotation plant.

Mike McGivern, in yellow, was our tour guide. Here we started our tour outside the flotation plant. Big thanks to Courtney Young (in white), our Montana Tech host.

Be warned, lots of photos after the jump...

STEEL: From Start to Finish

The music moves the story along nicely, but the images of massive, molten pours of iron sluicing through a steel mill doesn't really need much jazzing up.

This video provides an overview from the mining of iron ore, the smelting of ore into pure iron, the addition of non-iron ingredients into the steel melt, casting the steel, forging and de-scaling the steel sheets, heat- and cold-treating the steel, and coating some of the steel for various applications.

Honestly, it's a great overview of the processes involved.

Butte, America (part 1 - Berkley Pit)

I just got back from Butte, Montana for our first ASM Teachers Camp under the Big Sky.

While there, we got to tour a couple of places that might be worth sharing.

On Monday night we took a trolley tour of Butte from a Butte High School history teacher, Chris Fisk. Yes, the Chris Fisk of 'saving a pig from Berkeley Pit' fame. (The tour was phenomenal, by the way. If ever you're in town, check the tours out. It was seriously outstanding.)

This post is going to focus on the portion of the field trip that visited the Berkeley Pit, an abandoned, open-pit mine that was operational from 1955 until 1979. For three years then, pumps kept water out of the Pit, water that would otherwise have filled the Pit and filled the various shaft mines loosely connected to the Pit, an interconnected honeycomb of mines that laced the ground underneath all of Butte.

The Pit as we saw it on 7/21/14 on a nearly windless day.

Then, in 1982 the pumps were turned off, and the Pit began to fill...and fill...and fill with water. The water continues to rise at a rate of eight to ten inches a month, headed for a water treatment plant that has already been built at an elevation of 5410' above sea level, the critical height at which water will start to flow out of the Pit, contaminating the aquifer that is the source of Butte's drinking water. At that point, the water treatment plant will come online and maintain the water at a level just below that critical level...forever. As I write this, the water level in the Pit is 5318.01' (check current level here).

So, to our trip...(I warn you, there are lot and LOTS of photos after the jump.)

ASARCO - How It's Made: Copper

Aw, man...this video says it's 14:30 long, but the last five minutes is a repeat of the middle five minutes. The real video ends at 9:38.

Getting to that 9:38, though, is some impressive information about the mining and refining of copper.

Rock is exploded and strip mined...leached with sulfuric acid...electrochemically refined...or pulverized...turned into slurry and concentrated...mixed with silica flux and smelted...

The whole video is brilliantly informational, and the green flames - first appearing at 5:14 and reappearing a number of times, most brilliantly at 5:30 - are absolutely stunning.

Heck, the opportunity to see the shimmering, reflective, molten copper at 5:40 alone is worth the price of admission.

The video's original source is the ASARCO website...

http://www.asarco.com/about-us/our-locations/asarco-mineral-discovery-center/making-copper/

...and was uploaded to YouTube so it could be embedded here. The entirety of the ASARCO website has some great information about the copper refining process - images, diagrams, explanation, outstanding stuff. And, yes, the video is mirrored left-to-right, but the process is still shown clearly.