Mining Earth: From the Amazon to the ocean’s depths

It seems like another age, the days when we journalists were free to easily roam the world witnessing everything first-hand. Now, we look back even just a year ago and wonder at what we saw, and perhaps more to the point, at what we do not see now. In September last year, I was in a helicopter, flying low over the dense forests of French Guiana. I wrote about how rainforest covers 98 percent of its territory – a carpet of biodiversity that spreads in every direction as far as the eye can see, the canopy a thousand shades of green. Every now and then you would see a glint of light reflected off the countless rivers and waterways that meander through a jungle the size of Ireland. Such intact rainforest is seemingly a rare commodity in Amazonia. But we soon realised parts were not as untouched as they first seemed. As the helicopter banked around 180 degrees, it swooped over a great scar of brown earth hewn out of the canopy below. On the ground, little figures scattered in panic – the garimpeiros or illegal miners, looking anxiously up at us, some throwing equipment into muddy pools of water. They come to these forests in their thousands in search of a fortune. And some find it. The rise in the price of gold in recent years has sparked a mini gold rush. There are around 400 illegal mine sites in French Guiana, employing around 7,000 people. Around 10 tonnes of gold is extracted annually – worth an astonishing half a billion dollars and more. But the environmental toll is colossal. “Trees are uprooted and sites left abandoned when the miners move on. The process involves mercury which leaches into the soil and waterways, polluting the rivers and the whole biosphere,” Laurent Kelle from WWF told us at the time. And once the mines are abandoned, the area remains poisoned for years. style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;">