[Music] hi it's Mr Anderson and this is environmental Sciences video 19 it's on mining in 1848 at Sutter Mill in California James Marshall discovered some gold this kicked off the gold rush over 300,000 people came by land and by sea to California to strike it rich a few did most of them didn't the people who did make money were the merchants who were selling them mining equipment but what is mining it's extracting valuable minerals from the earth locked away in the earth and locked within or within the earth now we need minerals my computer's made
of minerals my glasses my ring is made of minerals we need minerals the problem is that they're formed naturally and they're distributed unevenly and so we're going to have different reserves in different parts of our planet once we discover those reserves however mining allows us to pull it out once it's gone it's gone these are nonrenewable resources it's not like uh crops where you can plant them once they're gone they're gone what do we do once we've pulled the ore out we process it and what's left over are called tailings now there's a lot of
different types of Mines we have what are called surface and subsurface mines surface mines could be things like strip mining open pit mining we have Mountaintop Mining and Placer mining subsurface is where we actually dig down below the surface now we've had legislation that's been put forward to encourage mining the big one was in 1872 that was the General mining act which encouraged mining on federal lands and offered protection to miners they could stake a claim now there are impacts of mining of course we have contamination of the air the soil the water it's a
decrease in biodiversity and also can be dangerous to humans who are doing the mining a hundred years ago being a coal miner was incredibly dangerous you could develop what's called Black Lung and so since then we put forward more legislation in 1977 is the surface mining control and Reclamation Act also known as smack ra it's a way to regulate coal mining but also reclaim some of these old min and so what do we need we need minerals valuable minerals they could be in the form of fuel like coal we can have metals and then we
can also have non-metals like gravel for example how did these minerals get there they're formed through this rock cycle and so for example as ous rock is cooled you're going to have minerals deposit deposited within the rock they can also come out of solution but the key point is that it's somewhat random on our planet where those minerals are found this shows you the uneven distribution of those value minerals so for example we might be able to find gold but a lot of those minerals are owned privately and we don't even know where they are
the key point is that they're non-renewable this is Hubert's uh Peak Theory and so if you look at for example oil extracted in Texas once they discovered oil in Texas the amount increased and then it dropped off if we look at other parts of the US it increased and then it dropped off or Norway for example it increased and then it dropped off once we discover mineral minerals in an area we're going to deplete those minerals in an area and so everything is going to have a peak we'll have Peak coal peak oil Peak gold
it's all eventually going to run away and so how do we get the ores out how do we get the minerals Out imagine this is a mountain that I've kind of sliced in half and you can see some of the valuable ore inside it so how do we get to it well we could do what's called a surface mine so that's what they were doing during a lot of that gold rush you have these big troughs we have a Placer mine where we dig The Ore out and then we use water to rinse it off
and then we've got the tailings that are left at the end we could do Mountaintop mining where we literally remove the top of a mountain we could do strip mining this is really common with coal so we're going to build strip after strip after strip and then we're going to extract that ore we're left with a lot of these tailings we could even get to ore that's really deep so this could be a giant copper mine for example open pit we dig down from the top down to the bottom some of these are kilometers across
at the top again we have that same problem of all what do we do with all the tailings when we're done or we could do a subsurface mine where we sink a shaft and then we're going to dig out those ores as well once we got them then we have to process them we have to grind up that rock and lots of times you grind it over and over and over again so if we're looking at for example a copper mine now I've got these really small uh ore and so I have to extract the
minerals so I could do that with chemicals and also they'll use bubbles so this is froth filtration where we'll get the minerals deposited on the surface of these bubbles we extract them that way and then we use smelting which is heating them up we get different densities and so we can pour off a lot of the What's called the slag the minerals that were the metals that we don't really need but when we're done we're left with what are called these tailings and it's hard to get rid of those this is red mud it comes
from the processing uh that that gives you aluminum and so legislation has been put forward to increase the amount of mining in 1872 the general mining act allowed miners to mine on public lands and also allowed them to stake a claim so you get 160 acres and so you don't have to worry about somebody else grabbing the ore you can build up your mining equipment and develop that of course there have been impacts over the last 100 years you're removing the soil you're removing a lot of that biodiversity we get some of the minerals moving
into the air a lot of it gets leeched into the soil and it's really dangerous for humans as well and so in 1977 more legislation was put forward smack ra surface mining control and Reclamation Act it instituted the office of surface mining this kind of falls to the level of the states and so they're regulating coal mining but also it allows for Reclamation of lands and so this coal mine is actually in Europe but you can see what it looked like years later so we remove the soil and then we're putting all that back in
and hopefully we get that biodiversity again now this problem never goes away we have thousands of abandoned mines in the US you maybe heard about this one in 2015 the gold King mine in Southwest Colorado it was a candidate for a super fun site EPA was monit in it but you had a rupture of the dam and we have all of these uh chemicals spilling into the river that move through Colorado and New Mexico and so it's a problem that we'll have to deal with into the future so did you learn the following could you
pause the video at this point and fill in all the blanks I'll try to again what we're looking for are valuable minerals and so the reserves are going to be where they're found we eventually create what are called tailings uh surface mining could be strip mining we also have open pit mining in 1977 we had smack Ro put forward as a way to govern coal mining and increase Reclamation so that's Mining and I hope that was helpful [Music]
