The 1849 California gold rush is the reason fish in San Fransisco Bay are so high in mercury today. When I hiked in certain areas in the Sierras and in the mountains of Colorado I was warned to be careful which creeks I got my water out of since portable filters or boiling won’t remove mercury or cyanide and some creeks are polluted with unsafe levels of one, the other, or both. And it continues.

http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2001/109-10/focus.html
http://saiic.nativeweb.org/ayn/goldgreed.html
http://www.seattlepi.com/specials/mining/27007_sanluis12.shtml

Whoever figures out how to get the vast tonnage of gold out of seawater will both get very rich and stop this slow-motion environmental train wreck (so long as it doesn’t involve yet more heavy metals, cyanide, or something equally toxic to extract it). There’s enough trace gold in seawater to make it as cheap (and maybe cheaper) than aluminum foil is now. Incidentally, aluminum also used to be a precious metal (worth more than gold) until the electrolytic process for refining it from bauxite was invented.

In the case of gold or aluminum, it’s not the scarcity of the element that makes it expensive (or used to) since neither is scarce, it’s the difficulty of extracting it into it’s pure form. Aluminum is the world’s most common metallic element but it’s locked up in rocks and soil and was very hard to extract until relatively recently. Most of the Earth’s gold is diluted in seawater, and from what I’ve read the world’s oceans contain roughly 10^15 tons of it (the concentration averages out to ~1mg/ton of seawater, though I’d guess it’s higher in places like the Mariana Trench). It’s definitely not going to be easy, but it’s theoretically possible.

And for some real eye-opening fun, check out “modern” lead mining (especially if you drive an “eco-friendly” hybrid, lol).

— Lisa, SocImages

Oh sure. I didn’t mean to say that US goldmining was long gone, but the entrepreneurship we associate with the (fictional) Old West is (replaced by large companies with employees working for wages).

— SocImages

Yes, there is a place called “Columbia.” It’s the alternative, poetic name for America (usually in reference the United States of America). The vast majority of places named “Columbia” are in North America (or named by – probably White – North Americans), and most of that set of places are in the United States.

The woman dressed in white and holding a torch – the symbol of Columbia pictures – is Columbia, the (commercialized) female personification of the United States. (Although I don’t really know why the Statue of Liberty isn’t referred to as Columbia, but I might be wrong here.)

Columbia is also a famous outdoor sportswear company favored by many Americans, that – along with GoreTex jackets – mark them as being American whenever they travel the world.

The miners are made out to be so evil because they are destroying the rainforest, but when you meet them, they are so nice it’s hard to know how to feel about it. Here are pictures from my trip:

http://heatherleila3.blogspot.com/2009/06/nos-garimpos.html