The process is almost alchemical. Take a bucket of soil, sediment and scattered flecks of gold, add mercury and wait. After the mercury binds the disparate bits, the resulting amalgam is easily removed from the remaining slurry. A blowtorch burns the mercury off, leaving nothing but pure gold.
To the Peruvian miners that employ it, the method might as well be magical, as it turns loose scraps of metal into an income that could be otherwise hard to produce in the remote Amazon rainforest. But all that excess mercury, whether burned off or dumped on the ground, has lasting health effects that can be felt hundreds of kilometers away from a mining operation, according to a new Duke University study.
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