But that wasn’t enough for miners who wanted to get even
more gold out of the water. They added mercury to the sediment during
the mining process, which binds to gold, making it heavier and easier to
recover.
It’s been long-known that some of the poisonous mercury
from the Sierra made its way downstream. One big example of that is the
crater in Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park.
“It was more than a billion cubic meters of sediment,” said
scientist Michael Singer. “That’s about a third as much as was
displaced by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens.
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