Mountains, mines, terricons - traces of ancient mining (8.díl)

1 13. 06. 2017
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality
The tailings pond
We will return to the city of Purmamarca in Argentina. Let's look at a fragment of the Andes in the area of ​​this town from a satellite. Coordinates: -23.654545, -65.653234. I took a screenshot of an area about 150 km wide.
 In Red I denoted a small fragment And, the diameter of 100 km. These are the colored heaps and heaps from mining and metallurgical activities that we have seen in one of the previous sections. It was definitely not only iron, but the whole periodic table.
Green is marked by the bottom of a salt lake in the neighborhood. It is called Salinas Grandes (-23.715660, -66.010649) and measures 45 km in length. Its distance from the ocean is 450 km.
Here's a photo of the lake and its surroundings:
 
Pretty, huh?
You should know about this saline (and its thousands similar to the planet) two things:
1. Repeatedly, mining takes place. Salt, potassium carbonate, borax and soda are lived there;
2. and the second thing, which is directly related to these lakes, is the following:
Methods of chemical processing of ores can be divided into two basic groups: acidic and alkaline. The crushed extracted raw material undergoing enrichment is dissolved and the elements of interest and their compounds form a solution, from which they are then extracted by thickening and vacuum filters. The remaining brine is then discharged into the sedimentation tank - sludge pond.
Sludge ponds are the basic type of surface warehouses, which are built on the principle of one or more stages of dams, banks and sludge warehouses. Natural processes take place in sludge ponds: accumulation of atmospheric precipitation, development of microorganisms, course of oxidation and other processes, ie self-regenerating process. However, with the presence of large amounts of salts and total lack of oxygen, this self-regenerating process lasts tens to hundreds of years.
Type "tailing poinds" into the search engine and view photos of the largest ones. An unimaginable amount of liquid and often toxic waste is accumulated in them.

Here is a schematic diagram of the drain tank construction (gray color refers to sludge). The dike can be continuously increased.

Variants of the structure of the ponds

Drainage dam Tanjinshan, China. There are dams created here and the bottom is secured with an impermeable foil.
Construction of Highland Valley Copper EYNAKR.
The Sierrita Copper Mine (31.862114, -111.069172) at the Sierrita copper mine, Arizona:
Belarusian wasteland (52.856884, 27.532275) - Future mountains on the horizon and arid salt lake. Think about how this terrain will look like a hundred or a thousand years ...
Tar Sands Tailings Pond, Alberta. Large volumes of tailings are a by-product of oil sand asphalt extraction, and management of these debris is one of the most difficult environmental problems faced by the country's industry:
Ernest Henry Mine, Queensland, Australia (-20.451796, 140.731307), mining of gold, silver, and copper (the subsequent 1,9 x 1,9 km for the subsequent satellite image):
Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA (41.174671, -112.573648). Length 117 km:
The length of the quay is 17 km:
"White Sea" Pond, Berezinki, Perm region, RF (59.435571, 56.728634). One of the world's largest potable salt and fertilizer plants is concentrated here. In addition, sodium, magnesium and titanium are also extracted.
As a result of intensive mining activities, there have been several large declines in recent decades in countries that directly threaten residential areas. The ruthless pillaging of natural resources by some Russian oligarchs carries their dangerous fruits:
A big danger is also the collapse of the dams of sludge ponds, when toxic sludge will flood the settlement below. Such an ecological catastrophe occurred, for example, in 2010 near Ajka in Hungary, where there are bauxite processing plants. Strongly alkaline caustic red sludge containing heavy metals then flooded several villages and infested watercourses. At that time, 10 people died and more than 130 were chemically burned or otherwise injured:
Consequences of dam rupture in Brazil:

The Bento Rodrigues district is pictured covered with mud after a dam owned by Vale SA and BHP Billiton Ltd burst in Mariana, Brazil, November 6, 2015. A dam holding back water from the iron ore mine in Brazil that is owned by Vale and BHP Billiton burst on Thursday, devastating a nearby town with mudslides and leaving officials in the remote region scrambling to assess casualties. The mining company Samarco, a joint venture between Brazil's top iron miners and BHP, said in a statement it had not yet determined why the dam burst or the extent of the disaster at its Germano mine near the town of Mariana in Minas Gerais , south eastern Brazil. REUTERS / Ricardo Moraes - RTX1V1JZ

A large part of water reservoirs with earth dams are former quarries and surface mines previously often used as flooded sludge ponds. However, due to the long period of self-cleaning processes, they are no longer dangerous today. I am engaged in underwater hunting and I have dived in many of them in the Crimea. In the Guerrilla Reservoir, in the Simferopol Reservoir, in the Sástlivjenská Reservoir. One and the same picture could be seen everywhere - underwater ledges, large areas of horizontal shelves, for example at a depth of 5-7 meters, which are suddenly cut off by steep slopes into the depths at a considerable distance from the coast. The composition of the bottom - white limestone sludge and small limestone crumb. It is often not possible to sink to the bottom, because the transparency at a depth of 7 - 12 meters is reduced to zero due to the white limestone emulsion, which stands at a horizontal level as a surface.
Here is the Sástlivjenská Reservoir (44.5806, 34.0836) in the Crimea. The hills in the background are ancient loose dumps:
I have interesting information to confirm. After the return of Crimea to Russia, the transition to Russian standards. And so at Lake Gasfort (44.5278378N, 33.6798853E) below Sevastopol, where I also dived, the status was changed from a reservoir to a sludge pond. Lake Gasfort supplies water to Sevastopol:
And even the tiny lake in Pirohorka near Bachčisaraj, 16 m deep, where I fished pike underwater, turned out to be a flooded sludge pond. At the bottom is white-gray greasy mud. On one side is the earth dam and on the other either trimmed limestone terraces or dumps of limestone crumbs.
Panenský Crimea, pearl of Russia ...
At present, the level of mining has, of course, fallen. In the past, however, the boom used to be colossal.

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And what have our ancestors left behind?
The following photo is Dead Sea, Israel. Huge ancient pond. And before - the mine. But when the rock was extracted, the mine was used as a pond. This is a logical and cost-effective practice:
The current level is lower than before, so I think the original dam was built much higher than the current level. Is located here:
Over time, old and arid sludge tanks can disintegrate and lose shape. This brings the possibility to pass such an object as a solončak (salt marsh), which is a depression in the terrain or the bottom of a dry lake, covered with a layer of clay and layers of salt.
Examples are here:
Tuz Gölü, Turkey (38.753178, 33.340264). Length 80 km, 50 km (dimensions vary by year) and 900 meters at sea.
The average depth is around 2 meters. Potassium chloride is extracted here:
When you look around, with your experience, you will surely find infinitely evidence of old mining: hail, terricon, and re-mining. One small example from Google Earth:
Nau Co Lake (32.842467, 82.187618), China. It is located at an altitude of 4.378 meters above sea level. Besides, you'll discover extensive colorful dunks:
The "mountains" around him play almost all colors. From one side to blue:
... from the other are the "hills" arranged as ruler to brown:
Lake Natron, Tanzania (-2.357405, 36.043397) - Natron is soda, a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate. A strongly alkaline lake with a length of more than 50 km, a width of 22 km and a maximum depth of 3 meters lies 600 meters above sea level. Its pH ranges from 9 to 10.5. If you explore its surroundings, you will also find signs of ancient mining. Which I leave to you.
Lake Baskunčak (48.196332, 46.895606) and Mount Bagdo, Astrakhan region, RF. Its area is 115 km2 and is 21 meters below the sea level. High-quality salt (NaCl) has been benefiting from time immemorial and continues today.
Colorful slopes of the Bagdo Salt Mountains and the background of the pond:
An aerial shot of the same place is clearly visible remnants of an ancient huge dump, which was about 3 long and half a kilometer and still today is at the highest point high 100 meters.
Baskunčak
Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, USA (40.693925, -113.898203). Bonneville Desert with an area of ​​240 km2, known for the extraction of table salt (accounts for 90% of total mining in the US) and also other mineral salts - potassium, magnesium, lithium, sodium:
And that's what looks up there. Does anyone else doubt that there was once a huge surface mine and then a pond?
And how do you like this prehistoric, progressively decaying hail? You can find it next to:
And once again, the Great Salt Lake.
Ze satellite images (but this time we can find the image on maps.cz, because Google is somewhat "misty" in these places) it is quite clear that this whole area was once a giant surface mine.

I think the help was enough.
You certainly understood the overall principle. If you find it interesting, turn on Google Maps or Google Earth and look for white salt spots on the continents. Zoom in on them and look for the remains of the dikes. Next to it will be dumps and heaps with traces of erosion on the slopes. Then take a look at the maps of natural resources that are now being mined in these areas, what useful minerals have been identified, and the picture will begin to take shape.
But we must note that there is another well-founded version of how salt water came from the oceans to the inland parts of the mainland, namely the entrapment of tidal water from ancient cataclysmic tsunamis; therefore, salt lakes located near the coastline could have formed due to this reason. To make things clear, first start analyzing salt lakes and deserts high in the mountains. For example, there are 250 salt lakes in Tibet…
Try everything you can find around Lake Drangkhok Tso 31.7791269N, 89.4366197E.
A lot of luck in your, now an independent search is yours for the author! And yet PS:
Sometimes readers ask me where old, high-performance mining techniques have happened. It is not possible that there is nothing left!
I answer them this way snippet from the film Armed Baron:

Mountains, mines terricony

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