Tuesday, April 22, 2014

My Year of Darwin 4/22/2014: Chilean copper in Welsh mines

 Charles Darwin
"These mines are of copper, and the ore is all shipped to Swansea, to be smelted. Hence the mines have an aspect singularly quiet, as compared to those in England: here no smoke, furnaces, or great steam-engines, disturb the solitude of the surrounding mountains." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

I suppose the Welsh coal and rail lines made the shipping a necessity. The downside is that smelting is probably the greatest source of pollution -then and now. The same situation occurs in Palmerton, where there was a zinc smelter. There were no zinc mines there and no coal but it was a convenient place for the two to meet. The result was exhaust full of heavy metals that obliterated the vegetation across an entire valley. With the loss of vegetation the soil washed away and left bare rock for two decades. I suspect that there are many sites like this in Wales. Fortunately, the site in Pennsylvania is currently being restored. Their restoration work can be viewed here. I've done some work at the Lehigh Gap Nature center on food webs and hope to get it published soon. 

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