Mining- Environmental Degradation & Sustainability Blog

The mine Mount Polley is located in Britsh Columbia, Canada. It's an open pit mine. Open-pit mining is removing minerals such as gravel, sand, and metal ores by digging them out of the earths surface and leaving an open pit behind. Minerals that are found in this mine are copper and gold. The Mount Polley property covers 18,794 hectares, which consists of seven mining leases totaling 2,007 hectares and 43 mineral claims encompassing 16,787 hectares. Copper and gold are a big thing in our society. Copper is in almost everything these days and we need them to live. 

Hazeltine Creek following the spill  (photo by Chris Blake).

 On August 5, approximately 10 billion litres of wastewater and 5 billion litres of solid tailings waste escaped the impoundment at imperial metals ’ Mount Polley mine in the interior of British Columbia. The creek that received the brunt of the flow was completely obliterated, some of the waste backed up into Polley Lake and some the wastes and debris from the torrent continued downstream into Quesnel Lake.Extraction  and processing methods, and how it can cause environmental degratation and pollution, and environmental impact 

• The grinding circuit consists of two parallel rod mill/ball mill circuits and a pebble mill circuit. Crusher product is first split between to two rod mills where it has water added to form slurries. The slurries are pumped to cyclones that classify the ore particles by size. The larger particles flow to feed the ball mills while the fine particles are discharged to the second stage of grinding: the pebble mill circuit. The ball mills are in "closed circuit", meaning that the discharge is pumped to the classifying units (cyclones) and the particles will not pass to the next grinding stage until they are fine enough to be classified as such. The second stage grinding circuit (the pebble mill circuit) also consists of mills, pumps and cyclones. Three pebble mills receive the coarse product from the cyclones, fed by pumps. The pebble mills are so named as they use pebbles (rocks obtained from the crusher) for grinding. Particles finer than 200 microns are then pumped as slurry to the flotation circuits 

• The flotation circuit separates the valuable minerals from the waste minerals. The particle size reduction described above is imperative to separation as the mineral grains are very fine, with a mean diameter size of 50 microns. The valuable minerals, mostly in the form of sulphides, are separated from waste minerals (gangue minerals) by floating and being collected and upgraded or cleaned

  "“Under the Boundary Waters Treaty, the U.S. and Canada are both committed to not polluting waters on their own side of the border to the injury of health or property on the other side of the border. Canada is not taking their treaty obligation seriously. We ask the State Department to work with Canada to ensure the treaty is respected and our interests are protected,” said Heather Hardcastle, a gillnetter and co-owner of Taku River Reds based in Juneau." Canada didn't really do what they had to do in their part. A mine that they compare the Mount Polley mine to is the Red Chis. Multiple large-scale, open-pit mines like Red Chris are currently in various stages of development in the watersheds of three productive transboundary salmon rivers, the Taku, Stikine and Unuk, which flow from B.C. into Alaska. "These projects raise red flags for many, including tribes, commercial and sport fishermen, tourism operators, municipalities and political leaders who have spoken out in numerous resolutions and letters." 

  
  
  
  
  Before picture.

         2014 picture 

  Before and 2014 picture from  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster  

• Sources: 

  
  

  http://www.imperialmetals.com/s/MountPolleyMine.asp

  http://www.sitnews.us/0215News/021015/021015_mount_polly_review.html

Biodiversity Hotspots: West African Forests

        A biodiversity is the variety of world or in a particular habitat/ ecosystem. My group choose the West African Forests, this is classified as a biodiversity hotspot because three out of 20 species are threaten. Also humans hurt the forest by logging, mining, hunting, and population growth. The West African Forests, are part of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia Cote, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Togo Guinea, and Cameron.   

         The West African Forests is home to to an estimated 9,000 vascular plant species. More than 20 species live in this forest. Fruit bats being one of the species, these fruit bats carry ebola. In this article I read it talked about how the more people cut down the trees, the faster/ more people can get ebola. So while they help the environment, in a way they hurt themselfs too! 

       This is a food web for the West African Forest. The food web shows that the python and jaguar are the tertiary consumers. The secondary consumers are the vampire bats, iguanas, red-eyed tree frog, chimpanzees, and parrots, The primary consumers are the macaws, fruit bats, monkeys, and insects. So that makes the orchids, seeds, banana trees, bamboo, and coconut trees the producers of the West African Forest food web. The decomposers being the bracker fungi, jelly-like fungi, gilled fungi, slime mold, and coral fungi.

        Among the many flagship plant species in this hotspot are a number of economically important species. The oil palm ( Elaeis guineensis), widely planted throughout the tropics for oil production, is native to the hotspot, while valuable timber species include the African ebony ( Diospyros gracilis), two genera of African mahogany ( Entandophragma and Khaya), and iroko ( Milicia excelsa), which is widely exploited. Fish diversity is quite remarkable in the Guinean Forests hotspot, with more than 510 freshwater fishes, 35 percent of which are thought to be endemic. About a quarter of the world's 350 species of killifish live here, half of which are endemic. Cichlid fishes are also prominent, with more than half of the over 60 species endemic to the hotspot. Four of the five endemic genera of cichlids are found only in Lake Barombi Mbo in northwest Cameroon. One of the endangered species is the chimpanzee. They are endangered because of habitat loss, since people log, mine, and farm in their habits. Also because of bushmeat, but since people have made a big trade out of it there is less for the chimpanzee.

For us to restore this ecosystem, people should stop cutting down the trees and using the forest resources for their own use, because the live there really needs them to live. It has become a biodiversity hotspot since people started using more of it's sources for unhealty use for the ecosystem, like mining in order to do that they have to dig deep into the earth with isn't good. Also many of the humans causes are bad for all the animals and plants that live there.

         

     Overall learning about this and doing all this research made me learn a lot about biodiversity hotspots and that humans cause a lot of what is going on to the world. Although people are the main cause for all the bad happening in the environment, they also have the power to stop it and fix it but the real question is when are people going to open their eyes and see what really is going on, before it's too late!

Learning About Food Webs and Energy Pyramids Summary

During our activity in science class my group each made our own food chains and then together we made a food web. A food chain is a sequence of organisms, each of which serves as a source of food or energy for the next. A food web is the organisms in most ecosystems form a complex network of interconnected food chains. We also learned that as energy transfer through food chains and food webs the energy is lost. A pyramid of energy flow illustrate the energy loss. I leaned about how 10% of the energy gets lost each times it's transfers throught a food chain/ food web. A food chain / food web can start with 100 units of energy and end up with .000001. The less units of energy an animal gets after eating the more of the same thing it has to eat. In class we did an activity of an ocean food chain. It stated of with alge ( it had 100 units of energy) the next part of the food chain was a crab that ate the alge but only got 10 units of energy. Then came the squid that eats the crab and only gets .10 units of energy. At the end there's the killer whale that eats the squid and only gets .01 units of energy. That's an example of an energy pyramid. 

This is what we did in class of a food web. Each three person in my group made a food chain and put them all together. The environment for this would be a swap or wetland. 

Ecological Footprint Summary

During my science class I learned a lot from our Ecological Footprint Web Activity. Ecological footprint is the impact of a person or community on the environment, expressed as the amount of land required to sustain their use of natural resources. In the Ecological Footprint I learned that it does matter how you live , because I did a quiz in http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/ and it showed that if everyone lived like me we would need 4.4 Earths just to resource everything! Which is a lot because in the real world we don't have 4.4 Earths we only have one which mean we need to really watch the way we do thing in this world so we can make the only earth we have last for a long time. Tracks the per-person resource demand Ecological Footprint and biocapacity in United States of America since 1961. Biocapacity varies each year with ecosystem management, agricultural practices (such as fertilizer use and irrigation), ecosystem degradation, and weather, and population size. Footprint varies with consumption and production efficiency. Where a dotted line is shown, interpolation estimates have been used in place of highly unlikely outliers in the results. (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/trends/united_states_of_america/) . The U.S have really high Ecological footprint and biocapacity. Japan has a must lower one as you can see in http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/trends/japan/. I think as human beings we really have to watch how we use sources because we don't have many to relay on.