ScienceShot: Gold Mining and the Damage Wrought

Today, gold mining gobbles up an average of 6145 hectares of rainforest per year in Madre de Dios—more than three times the rate before the 2008 financial crisis drove up the demand for gold. And as another paper in PNAS this week shows, it’s nearly impossible to clean up after gold mining: Mercury pollution from the 19th century California gold rush will likely persist in the environment for more than 10,000 years.
http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2013/10/scienceshot-gold-mining-and-damage-wrought