To add insult to injury, the vast majority of these mines have been closed off to the public in the last 20 years for liability reasons, even the ones that don’t generate significant amounts of latent pollution. Obviously most people don’t want to be around a defunct uranium mine but the same policies have closed off all other mines.
You used to be able to roll up on a mine tailing pile or even go into the mine to look for mineral specimens. Even though the mines are no longer economically viable, they were a gold mine for rock hounds and educators looking for interesting rocks.
Now all of that is gone and all we have left is bullshit commercial operators that make fake tailing mixed with commercially sourced gems.
There are still quite a few accessible mines on public lands in Arizona. Well, generally the mine shafts themselves are off limits for safety reasons, but you can usually get to the tailings piles. In the last couple of years I have pulled nice specimens of chrysocolla, fluorite, onyx from tailings.
It is a very good thing abandoned mines are closed. They are deadly and you should never go into one.
As someone who is over 60 and who has been going into abandoned mines for 40 years can I ask why?
What's next, no more bungy jumping, free climbing, surfing The Right, sinkhole diving, mustering cattle, etc?
Yes. Those are all extremely dangerous activities and our public hospitals should not be carrying the burden
I don’t think you understand what “mustering cattle” means.
Sierra Gordo and Ghost Town Living?
It surprised me when I moved west how recent some of these are, and that they are not all out in the middle of nowhere. There's a gold mine in Napa County that was developed in the 1980s, well after CEQA was enacted. The guy who owns it took out a billion dollars worth of gold and left a big hole where all the acid is impounded behind a dam, in the middle of the Cache Creek watershed. I visit that region frequently and I always wonder why we thought we had to do every last gold mine.
You answered your own question.
That person made a billion dollars and left the residents and state with the problems. Business genius.
Found the link to what you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur_Bank_Mine#McLaughlin_M...
"The McLaughlin Mine enjoyed a reputation as one of the most ecologically sensitive gold mining operations in the world. Nevertheless, during its last year of operation in 2002, the mine emitted 32,396 pounds of mercury into the environment."
Wow that's really saying something.
Eh. Moving rock that contains low concentrations of mercury into a pile is considered "releasing" it.
Whether it carries any risk to the environment depends on local factors.
Last I heard, the McLaughlin Mine pits are slightly alkaline. There was a period when they were filling up in the 90s where they were acidic, before being buffered by the pit wall rocks and backfill during reclamation.
same reason we monetize every click, fund every ad tech, and track every data point. People feel the need to exploit resources in order to get rich.
A billion dollars in actual gold is pretty real. Look at superfund sites like Captain Jack mine in Boulder. significant un-managed harm and not that much commercial output.
If only we could get back to lifestyle devoid of using any resources...
Username checks out :).
But, really, I think we’re both posting with a bit of hyperbole here. Of course monetizing resources is how we get resources. OTOH, not monetizing every resource is fine - there exists the possibility of future value in some resources that we haven’t discovered.
The middle ground is have states bake minesite remediation costs into the permissions contracts of mining leases and to enforce such obligations upon those who profit so as to not allow "bankruptcy" defaults by shell companies.
This will increase resource costs, put downwards pressure on consumption, etc but we'll still function as a society.
My father and my sister have geology degrees, and some of my father's early science work was mining-adjacent (although he also helped survey for the CA Aqueduct project).
He remains fascinated with them, and we'd often travel to mining towns (one in particular) to check out the neighborhood and scenery. When I was in high school, our big "California Vacation" was to the Mother Lode Country, all up and down the center of California, from SD to Yreka (I considered it absurd that there was "Eureka"--also the state motto--and the comparatively obscure "Yreka" even further north).
We stopped in places like Virginia City, Lodi, Sacramento, and more. We saw Sutter's Fort. I saw punk rockers in a small town just hanging out. All my sister wanted was a pool at our motel. We fought and bickered constantly. It was a huge disaster, but very scenic and generated plenty of memorable family photos.
Thanks for sharing that. He sounds like a good father.
He really is!! He taught me so much science, chemistry, radio, technology, just sort of whispering facts in my ear. It was the gentlest way to learn really amazing stuff when I was extremely too young and shouldn't have understood any of it. I was into space flight and computers by 3rd grade (1980).
What's amazing is how badly I fared in my systematic science classes beginning in high school. I started taking them over summertime, figuring I could handle a relaxed, accelerated schedule, but was far too social and flirting with girls to pay any attention. I didn't really expect to use hard natural sciences in an IT career anyway. I don't even use Calculus!
The scope was there had you wanted to pursue that path; in 1980 I started working on very large scale mapping software, building custom real time OS's and instruments, and ended up in exploration geophysics which included just a little calculus (upward and downward continuations of magnetic fields, a thousand and one Kalman filter applications, FFT's and wavelets, all manner of fancy math).