Iron MountainThis is an amazing chemical disaster. Iron Mountain is a site in Northern California th

Iron MountainThis is an amazing chemical disaster. Iron Mountain is a site in Northern California that started as a deposit of sulfide minerals. It originally formed on the ocean floor and it was thrust up onto the continent where humans found it. The sulfide minerals were mined as a source of copper, including the development of an open pit mine and several underground mine shafts.When sulfide minerals, particularly pyrite, are exposed to oxygen and water, they react. This chemical reaction gives off acidity, lowering the pH of the water in a runaway process. At Iron Mountain, this reaction has proceeded to an extreme. The waters inside the mines are so acidic that if it gets on clothes, it can eat right through them. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a robot that was once sent into the mine vanished and has never been found.Teams of scientists occasionally enter the mine to monitor conditions and sample the extreme minerals and organisms that live in there. They find all sorts of incredible textures – stalactites and stalagmites made out of iron and sulfur bearing minerals, dissolved in the acid chemical reaction and precipitated again. These waters often contain huge amounts of dissolved solids – literally grams per liter of dissolved iron, arsenic, cadmium, and so on. There’s so much solid stuff dissolved in the water that it can barely be considered water any more.Some of the drip sites are so acidic that the scientists literally had to understand how the pH scale works under conditions people had never measured before. pH is related to the activity of hydrogen in the water, and once water gets too acidic, the acidity suddenly starts going up rapidly and the pH plummets to numbers that barely make sense. The lowest pH ever measured on Earth was found at this mine, reaching -3.8.The water from this mine heads downstream and eventually enters the Sacramento River. The acidic, polluted water is extremely hazardous to fish and other wildlife in these rivers, and has contributed to fish kills for decades. This site is considered a Superfund site, where the US Environmental Protection Agency spends money to manage the outflow of the mine. There are now dams constructed that limit the outflow and allow treatment of the water before it heads downstream, at a cost to the taxpayers of millions of dollars. That cost is a legacy of the mine operation decades ago – legal cases continue to be argued over whether anyone will ever be forced to reimburse the government for the cleanup costs.-JBBImage credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_MineRead more:https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Inside-a-toxic-hellhole-Iron-Mountain-Mine-3254595.php#photo-2403783http://www.ironmountainmine.com/CATALYST.htmhttps://www.fws.gov/sacramento/outreach/featured_stories/2013/IronMountainMine/ -- source link
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