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July 17th, 2009 – Through the Bering Straits, the Chukchi Sea and Barrow
by Dr. R. Michael Reynolds
16 July 2009
UPDATE
As you know, we are now in Barrow playing hide-n-seek with the remnant ice floes of the Chukchi. When conditions are favorable, the ship will head out west for parts. We have a good deal of time on board here, mainly trying to stay out of each other’s way as the days droop by. Wind direction is easterly, off the beach and slowly changing as we wait for a whiff from the enormous decomposing whale carcass that is almost, but not quite, on the beach upwind.
I will be leaving the ship in a few days. Great sadness, and even though I plan to rejoin in New York, I hope I can continue to add updates from the scientific perspective during my hiatus.
GOLD IN NOME
Today, while we have the time–actually we are all sitting around the parlor on board sharing stories and feeling slightly edgy from too much free time–I want to jump back a few days to when we were in Nome where the gold boom is so unique and interesting. Two resources in our limited library are quite helpful for a discussion of Nome in Alaska: the January 2009 edition of National Geographic has an interesting article by Brook Larmer, “The Real Price of Gold,” and a book by Gay and Laney Salisbury titled “The Cruelest Miles.”
Gold was discovered in Nome by two Swedes and a Norwegian, popularly called “The Three Lucky Swedes,” in 1898 when they fished a cherry sized nugget out of a creek near the beach. They were in Nome to help the natives use reindeer as a food source, not for gold. A missionary of that time said “Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome is except the thing that caused it: the finding of gold.” The soil around Nome, on the beach, and in the sediment offshore contained gold. It was in the surface sediment, deposited there by glacial actions. Within a few years Nome was a major community in Alaska.
Over the rest of the twentieth century the gold boom all but died away. I was in Nome in the 1980’s doing ice research and we visited abandoned dredging machines from the old days. Mining was a piece of history then. However, gold came back. Over the last eight years the price of gold has risen 235 percent to $960 an ounce and gold mining around the world, Nome included, is in another boom time.
Nome seems to be growing again too. The newly expanded marina in Nome is filled with the most amazing collection of rag-tag Rube Goldberg floating contraptions. I never felt prouder of American inventiveness and industry as I did surveying these startling assemblages. The two photographs shown here are two examples that were parked just adjacent to Ocean Watch. On the left is “Casa de Pago,” one of the most sophisticated of the dredges. The photograph on the right is a simpler affair with no visible name. We met the owners of this one immediately upon docking and they were quite forthcoming with their story. A few years ago they were three truckers in Oklahoma who delivered flour to the Mrs. Baird’s bakery in Dallas and other parts of Texas. They were best buddies and chatted on their CB about going to Alaska and digging for gold. The idea of a Nome gold dredge took hold and for a year they made a dredge boat in their back yard, 1000 miles from the nearest ocean and 5000 miles from Nome. Economy was a consideration as one can see. The vessel must have made quite an impression as it was trucked to Seattle and barged North.
And here they are, working 12-16 hours in the land of the midnight sun. The dredging technique is to anchor in twenty to forty feet of water just offshore and lower a hose down to the bottom to vacuum up sediment through a long flexible hose. It is back breaking work. A SCUBA diver must be on the bottom to guide the vacuum. The ocean is so cold that special wet suits are required so hot water can be pumped through to heat the suit and this barely keeps the diver cognizant. After eight hours underwater–I repeat eight hours underwater–a second diver must take over. The sediment that is pumped to the surface is pre-filtered and saved for a final fine mesh filtering that finally reveals the gold flecks. According to these Oklahomans, a typical day brings in 2 ounces of gold and a really good day nets 4 ounces, about what a typical lawyer makes for an eight-hour shift.
Not bad compared to some other operations, such as the huge open pit mines in Indonesia where extracting a single ounce of gold, about the amount in a wedding band, require the removal of 250 tons of rock and ore. There, in the Batu Hijau pit 111 monster earth machines dig almost one hundred million tons of rock out of the ground every year. The environmental damage from gold mining is considerable. In many gold operations, especially the small-scale operations, mercury is used to separate gold from rock, or cyanide is used in a “heap leaching” process. It is estimated that one-third of all mercury released by humans into the environment is from artisanal gold mining operations. Waste in the open pit mining industry is massive, and in many cases, in third-world countries, toxic tailings are pumped offshore into the sea in a process called “submarine tailings disposal.” Ocean dumping is banned in most developed countries in the world because of the damage the metal-heavy waste can do to the ocean environment.
When one reads even a little about the cost of gold, in pollution, in war, slavery, environmental ruin, and human degradation, one has to question what is the real cost of that luxury on all of us? All the gold that has ever been mined would barely fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools, that’s 161,000 tons. The Batu Hijau pit in Indonesia creates that much waste in just 16 hours. Many top jewelers in the U.S. have stopped selling “dirty gold,” but that is a dot in the world-wide consumption.
I asked all the gold dredgers I met about the environmental aspects of their operations and I was pleased to find that no mercury or cyanide was used at all. The good citizens of Nome, the ones I met, are vigilant about toxic operations and would deny any such practice. For small operations new high-tech vibrating filter systems allow micro-pore sieves to process gold more effectively than the toxic techniques that use mercury or cyanide. When I asked them about the gouging of the bottom and its effect on the benthic communities, I was told that the dredge impact on the ocean bottom was a fraction of the effects of grounded ice. Further, the feeling was that the bottom rapidly comes back and after one to two years the floor looks virtually as it did before the dredging. That’s what I was told.
The “Casa de Pago” is a next generation mechanical wonder. It was invented by three ad hoc mechanical geniuses with little formal training but awesome practical intuition. Pago uses a robotic caterpillar-like vacuum head on the bottom so no diver is required. It has special underwater lights and cameras like those used on deep sea bathyscapes. This system allows twenty-four hour operation, easy when there is no night. The owners of Pago were very friendly and loved to talk about their mechanical wonder. Only one topic was not discussed: how much gold they recovered.
Remember: all views, ideas, and comments here are ad hoc, off the cuff, poorly researched, and subject to revision at any moment.
– Michael Reynolds michael@rmrco.com
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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EDITOR’S NOTE
We would like to take this opportunity to inform our Around the Americas followers that The Tiffany & Co. Foundation is not only a major sponsor of this project but Tiffany & Co. is a leader in the jewelry industry with respect to environmental conservation. In relation to this article, we encourage you to review the Tiffany & Co. sustainability policy specific to Sources and Mining Practices which can be viewed at http://www.tiffany.com/sustainability/
