“There has been a flurry of small [scale] gold miners, who have been dispersed, and are working independently. On the map, they look like thousands of independent miners,” says Greg Asner, who has been working with Peru’s environment ministry to aerially map the rainforests from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, which has a lab in Lima. “The problem is still there. It’s now more diffused than ever before”.
Asner says that his research has shown that illegal gold mining was destroying the forest at twice the officially acknowledged rate. According to the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project, gold mining has destroyed some 50,000 hectares in the region and, has released some 30 tons of mercury into nature.
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