Extent of Peruvian Amazon lost to illegal goldmines mapped for first time

Dan Collyns in the Guardian (UK): The area affected by illegal gold mining in Peru's south-eastern Amazon region increased by 400% from 1999 to 2012, according to researchers using state-of-the-art mapping technology.

Using airborne mapping and high-satellite monitoring, researchers led by the Carnegie Institution for Science also showed that the rate of forest loss in Madre de Dios has tripled since the 2008 global economic crisis, when the international price of gold began to rise to new highs.

Until this study, thousands of small, clandestine mines that have boomed since the economic crisis went unmonitored, according to the research team, which was led by Carnegie's Greg Asner and worked with Peru's environment ministry.

Crucial technological differences, such as the use of the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System-lite (CLASlite), meant the team was able to map both large and small mining operations.

"The gold miners are working in thousands of small groups, so it takes our high resolution techniques to map their activities," said Asner, who developed the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), technology that uses algorithms to detect changes to the forest in areas as small as 10 square metres (about 100 square feet), allowing scientists to find small-scale disturbances that cannot be detected by traditional satellite methods....

This CLASlite map shows the areas along the Madre De Dios river damaged by small, clandestine gold miners between 1999 and 2012. Photograph: CLASlite Team

Mining saps a thirsty desert

Michelle Tolson in IPS: The Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in the southern Gobi desert in Mongolia has become a symbol of a looming crisis: a limited water supply that could be exhausted within a decade, seriously threatening the lives and livelihoods of the local population.

Oyu Tolgoi is one of the largest copper deposits in the world and has attracted major investors over the years, from Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Capital Corporation, to the mining giant Rio Tinto, which now holds a majority stake in the investment, while the Mongolian government controls just 34 percent of the project.

Now, local communities fear that returns on investments will take precedence over their own subsistence, while simultaneously heightening the region’s acute water shortage. A 2010 World Bank water assessment report for the southern Gobi region projected a “lifespan” for water resources based on the number of mining projects in the pipeline, as well as a study of the region’s growing population whose primary occupation is herding and rearing livestock.

...Subsistence herders must share a limited water supply with numerous mines. A 2009 World Bank report found that mining exploration licences cover 55 percent of this area. Omongovi province, for instance, “has 63 licences issued for extraction and 400 licences for exploration.”...

A desert landscape in Inner Mongolia, shot by Fir0002, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Argentine court upholds glacier law in mining area

Reuters: Argentina's Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that key articles of a glacier protection law should apply in a northern province where the world's largest gold miner, Barrick Gold Corp, is building a huge mine high in the Andes.

Tuesday's ruling takes precedence over a 2010 decision by a federal judge in San Juan province who suspended the application of six key articles of the law following a complaint presented by mining industry groups.

"The Supreme Court revokes the precautionary measures that suspended the application of the glacier law in the province of San Juan," the official judicial news agency said.

San Juan province is home to Barrick's Veladero mine, which lies at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters (13,000-feet) not far from the company's huge Pascua Lama project - a roughly $5 billion gold-silver mine set to enter production in 2013...

At the Veladero mine, shot by GRITTA, Antonio, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Gold prices spur six-fold spike in Amazon deforestation

Terra Daily: Deforestation in parts of the Peruvian Amazon has increased six-fold in recent years as small-scale miners, driven by record gold prices, blast and clear more of the lowland rainforest, according to a new Duke University-led study. The study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, combined NASA satellite imagery spanning six years with economic analyses of gold prices and mercury imports to document the forces responsible for deforestation in Peru's biologically diverse Madre de Dios region.

Roughly 7,000 hectares, or about 15,200 acres, of pristine forest and wetlands were cleared at two large mining sites between 2003 and 2009, with a dramatic increase in deforestation occurring in the last three years. "In addition to these two large sites, there are many scattered, small but expanding areas of mining activity across Madre de Dios that are more difficult to monitor but could develop rapidly like the sites we've tracked over time," says Jennifer Swenson, assistant professor of the practice of geospatial analysis at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

Much of the deforestation visible in the satellite images has been caused by unregulated, artisanal mining by miners who are often among the poorest and most marginalized members of their society. "These are small-time miners; there is no big 'Goliath' mining company to blame," Swenson says. The miners often lack modern technology, have limited knowledge of mining's environmental or human health effects and rarely have safeguards to limit the release of the mercury they use to process their gold into the air, soil or water….

A gold coin depicting Septimius Severus, 193–211 AD. Aureus (7.23 gm). Struck 193 AD to celebrate the legion that proclamed him emperor. Image from Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license