Looking at the Peruvian Amazon from satellites, you can see the forests glowing with gold. While the luminescent dimples look beautiful from low Earth orbit, this image actually highlights a worrying problem in our home on planet Earth.
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured the above photo of the gold prospecting pits as he drifted over eastern Peru on Christmas Eve 2020. Perfectly struck by the sun’s rays, the gold-rich pits shine back with a brilliant reflection.
Search pits, as described by NASA Earth Observatory, consist of hundreds of tightly packed water-filled basins surrounded by plantless mud fields.
Worm-like interlocking channels on the left side of the image show the Inambari River, while Tambopata National Reserve, which is legally protected from mining, is also seen just below the clouds in the upper right corner of the photo. Although the contrast of the photo has been slightly increased, it was taken with a Nikon D5 digital camera that anyone can buy.
Gold mining is a major business in Peru, which is the sixth largest producer of precious metals in the world. Unfortunately, some of these mines feed off of illegal mining, which involves destructive processes that devastate the local environment and Amazonian communities.
In recent years, there have been major problems in Peru’s Madre de Dios, where modern-day gold rushes have led to the emergence of temporary cities and reckless exploitation of the environment for metals. Along with a large-scale deforestation, the surrounding ecosystem has also experienced polluted flooding.
One of the biggest concerns: Mercury and the much more toxic methyl mercury
In some cases, gold miners use mercury to separate gold ores from soil and sediments, often without adequate safety precautions. Mercury, itself a potent neurotoxin, seeps into ponds and can then be converted by microbial processes into an extremely toxic chemical, methyl mercury.
This has become a growing problem in Peru and other parts of South America. In addition to dealing with the environmental impact of mercury poisoning and illegal gold mining, Amazonian communities have also faced violence due to gold mining taking over their land.
For example, in the early 1990s, a group of miners broke into the Brazilian village of Haximú and slaughtered 16 Yanomami people, including a baby. In the much more recent 2020, two Yanomami people were reported killed after a clash with gold miners in northern Brazil.
By 2023, Brazil’s new government has taken some steps to stop illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest, but this major problem of South America remains.
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