The price of gold has more than doubled in the past decade, as a flood of new buyers has entered the world’s commodity market. Gold is in demand for jewelry and as a hedge against erosion in the value of traditional currency. Lots of new effort is devoted to finding new deposits of gold and to mining old veins that were not economical just a few years ago. Big new mines are proposed in Alaska and Canada.
But, nowhere is the impact of gold mining more visible than in the Amazon rainforest, where the rate of clearing for gold mining increased more than 400% from 1999 to 2012. More than 100,000 acres were in use for gold production in 2012, often by small family mining operations. A new survey used high-resolution remote sensing to map the extent of clandestine gold mining in the Amazon rainforest. Gold mining is now one of the leading causes of deforestation in Peru.
But, land clearing is not gold’s only impact. Small mining operations often extract gold from low-grade ores by mixing them with mercury. The mercury binds with gold, allowing it to be separated from the parent rock. Then, the mercury-gold mixture is smelted to drive off the mercury as a vapor. The process is responsible for enormous concentrations of mercury in streams draining the rainforest, exposure of miners to excessive mercury – a well documented toxin, and the contamination of fisheries.
Next time you visit a jewelry store or buy a few gold coins to sock away for the future, remember that the true price of gold is not just the sticker price. Gold leaves an enormous impact on the environment, often thousands of miles away.
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See Asner et al. 2013 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1318271110
Photo, taken on July 30, 2009, courtesy of Jemand Hatte via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.