Blaisers

But the key point here: from what I can tell, cyanide has been the main method of getting gold out of the ground for the last 120 years. (Yes, this process is still used today.) Before this technology came along, instead a thin coating of mercury was spread onto a copper plate, and the ore was allowed to wash over it. The gold stuck to the mercury, creating an amalgam, and then the amalgam was scraped off the plate and the mercury was boiled off (urk) to leave the gold behind.

And when processing mills shut down historically, why bother to dispose of your leftover deadly chemicals properly, when you can just bury them in your local tailings pile, which is already contaminated with mercury and arsenic? The known case of this happening in my local area was revealed through a bloom of “Prussian Blue” (ferro cyanide) on the surface of the tailings. Luckily, this is a fairly stable form of cyanide. Unluckily, geologists are crazier than archaeologists and they went ahead and dug a sample test unit right next to it, even knowing what it was, because science.

Since I’m seeing a few people tagging or commenting with the assumption that this post is about US history: this is a Canadian blog, based on my experiences in Canada, and this mine waste phenomenon is, unfortunately, a problem in much of the world. Nova Scotia, for example, had three separate “gold rush” phases from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Also, bonus content for those who are startled/fascinated by the arsenic concentrations, here’s a sample page from the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) report by Mike Parsons et al., showing arsenic concentrations at Mooseland, which isn’t a site I’ve worked on, but is noteworthy because one soil sample was over one-quarter arsenic. The site I worked at with a “tablespoon of soil to kill six people” calculation was less than half of that.

And for added context, the “acceptable and safe” concentration of arsenic in the soil on an industrial site, if I remember right, is 31mg/kg in Nova Scotia. The lowest sample shown here is over 6,000mg/kg.

if your without and you put nuts on it I don't make the rules snowflake

TRUCK

you put nuts on it I don’t

make the rules snowflake

He’s like “aw I actually can’t go out that night, I’m gonna hang out with [baby’s name].” He talks about her like they have conversations even though she can’t talk yet. It’s never “I took her” to a place, it’s always “we went.” He’s confident that she understands most if not all that happens around her and acts accordingly and it’s so sweet.

She’s one now, but I’ve worked with him since she was born and can guarantee he’s always been like this.