Soccer City Dwarfed by Mining Waste
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Soccer City World Cup stadium. Johannesburg, South Africa. CREDIT: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory |
Soccer City, the stadium built to host the World Cup finals today, may hold a whopping 97,400 people, but its size is nothing compared to the colossal amount of mining debris surrounding it.
Known as slag piles, these heaps hold massive clumps of crushed rock, which can be seen in a NASA satellite image, that are discarded after gold extraction. Gold-bearing rock layers were discovered in this region in the late 19th century, and gold mining has long powered South Africa’s economy.
Today the easy to reach gold is gone, and big mining companies go after deposits with as little as 0.015 ounces (0.43 grams) of gold per ton of rock that is dug from vast open pits. Most of it is microscopic flecks. A single wedding band, at this rate, would need 20 tons of gold-flecked rock.
Aside from ripping into the Earth, gold mines use tons of cyanide — about 180 tons of sodium cyanide worldwide each year — to extract gold from ore. Even the most cautious efforts to neutralize the deadly poison can't keep the stuff out of the environment. From cyanide-laden trucks crashing into rivers, to little leaks here and there, cyanide released from mining operations has killed wildlife, contaminated drinking water supplies, and at times killed virtually all aquatic life in stretches of river as much as 250 miles (400 kilometers) long.
The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this image of the World Cup stadium on May 14, 2009, while construction was apparently still in progress. Shaped roughly like a rectangle with rounded corners, the stadium sports high walls that cast long shadows toward the southwest.
Most of the vegetation in the above image appears either beige or brown. The green expanse to the east of Soccer City is a golf course.
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