RE: Rohingyas are now forced to fight9 Apr 2024 16:30
Good points Mr Gnome, the damaging effects of illegal and unregulated mining are all too often ignored by the markets, corrupt governments and the supposed regulators
At first glance, the Amazon rainforest of Peru’s Los Amigos Conservation Concession might seem like a pristine wilderness. Brightly colored birds flit through the jungle. A dense canopy of trees echoes with the cries of howler monkeys. Jaguars pad quietly through the shadows. Giant otters swim in Cocha Lobo Lake. But the forest is hiding a toxic secret: It is tainted by mercury at levels as high as those found in industrial regions in China, according to new research.
The mercury is the product of hundreds of illegal, small-scale gold mines, and is leaving its poisonous fingerprint in forest wildlife. “These forests … are receiving an enormous load of mercury, and the mercury is indeed entering into the food web,” says biogeochemist Jackie Gerson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research as a Ph.D. student at Duke University. The new study, the first to describe such effects anywhere in the world, is another strand in the growing web of evidence that connects mining to mercury pollution in rivers, fish, and forests.
Gold mining has recently outstripped coal burning as the world’s single largest source of airborne mercury pollution, annually releasing as much as 1000 tons of the potent brain and reproductive poison into the atmosphere. Using mercury to extract gold is a miner’s dream: The cheap, liquid metal, when mixed with a slurry of water and raw ore, binds with the precious gold. Miners then heat the globs of mercury and gold until the mercury burns off, floating away as a vapour.
https://www.science.org/content/article/illegal-gold-mines-flood-amazon-forests-toxic-mercury
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