Going For The Gold Sends Mercury Down The River

“Somebody will dive down to the bottom of the river with a scuba suit or some kind of tube to breathe,” says Bill Pan, an assistant professor in the Global Health Institute at Duke University. “They’ll be on the bottom sucking up the dirt.”

The miners sift through the dirt searching for flecks of gold and use a ball of mercury to extract tiny specks of specks of the precious metal from the sludge.

In this process, tiny beads of mercury end up getting dumped back into the river along with the leftover mud

http://www.kvlu.org/going-for-the-gold-sends-mercury-down-the-river/