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.
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).
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.
"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."
That's from the old mercury mines in the area and erosion from naturally enriched mercury soil/runoff from naturally enriched geothermal springs, not the McLaughlin gold mine.
(The Wikipedia article is for the Sulfur Bank Mercury Mine. The McLaughlin mine is referenced due to how gold was discovered, but it's about 15 miles away)
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.
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.
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.
Being uninformed may result in accidental injury or death.
rather than your blanket advice to just avoid risk altogether.
The Division of Minerals is legislatively mandated to conduct the State's AML program to identify inactive mines, rank their degree of hazard, and carry out activities to secure these sites
Clearly people do go into abandoned minesites to evaluate their current state.
The back end of https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/m... carried a much larger database of global abandoned mines withmore infomation on why production lapsed (a good number may still be economically feasible with modern techniques) that wasn't simply limited to Nevada. That data should still be there on request.
They're not exactly burdened by extreme sports injuries, most surfers, for example, are injured crossing roads, in car accidents, or at work falling off roofs, etc.
Citizens have an obligation to act responsibly when they partake in broad social contracts such as shared health care and insurance. Such a society must regulate access to areas of extreme danger (disused mines) to stop mentally unwell citizens from endangering themselves but more importantly endangering their fellow contract holders.
The whole inland gold belt region is filled with abandoned shafts and it's rare anyone falls down them.
What's the cost benefit in fencing off tens of thousands of individual pre existing shafts and to what degree of robust security construstion do you recommend? More to the point, what's the tax payer out of pocket cost for that?
You don't appear to have actually thought this through in any pragmatic sense.
Growing up in the Kimberley it was all Bull Buggies, Broomstick choppers, Quarter Horses and dirt bikes, all intrinsically a wee bit risky - but good practice for "grown up" geophys surveying in custom STOL crop dusters.
3:54 B taurus indicus begs to differ! (no oysters on the menu plz?)
The guy who taught me to swing a Brunton was over four times my age, and whenever we were hiking in to a site he led us in: this basically meant we young vegetables would be frantically scrambling up to a nearby ridge so we could spot where he'd got to, only to eventually notice him waving cheerfully at us from the next ridge line over.
'Wee bit risky" is right, keep your head on a swivel and don't be on the quad bike when the irate bull flips it and all is okay.
Your leading surveyor was very much our father when we were in single digits .. four hour long walks across rugged landscapes and down gorges with him as a barely visible dot waaaay up ahead.
He's a lot slower now approaching 90 .. but can still split wood and shovel a tonne or two.
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.
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