A show about science. By scientists. Techno investigates gold at any cost. We travel deep into the rain force of these illegal Mining Operations except for miles and miles away from the main highway to uncover a gold rush thats turning lush jungle into utter devastation High Pressure water hoses and blasted out and its not just the land people are stepping in to marjorie im filled taurus im an entomologist ive conducted Extensive Research in this rainforest so this story is personal really pains me to see this brita davison is a biologist specializing in ecology and evolution now she shows us the high tech tools that are exposing what even the i cant see so where its blood red thats where the mercury pollution is. Most intense we will share our findings with lindsay merengue shes an ex cia analyst thats our Team Everything weve been saying its for this you know its do some signs. Hey guys welcome to techno im photo was joined by Lindsay Moran and marie to davidson this upcoming episode is an important one to me takes place in true have done a lot of my research and it is a tale of contrasts we will see rain forest full of new species and then we will see the devastation that humans have done to extract gold and as we know with devastating stories like this where theres a lot of damage science can play are all here not just in monitoring and discovering whats going on but in trying to help process i think this is a story having looked at some of the images that one image of the devastation pretty much says it all absolutely this is an important story its one thats very near and dear to my heart and it starts in the proving rain forest. And. The amazon rain forest for more than 50000000 years its been a cradle of life. This is what pristine rain forest looks like. Rush. Untamed. Bursting with wildlife. But maybe not for long because the soil underneath is laced with gold and the human desire for it can turn all of this. Into a toxic waste land like this. This is love pompa in the buffer zone of the pot to National Reserve its part of more than 100000. 00 acres of rainforest and truth that have been decimated by an illegal gold rush. To investigate techno travel deep into prove to a region called bodger it did the us the mother of god its one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet and the source of 70 percent of the illicit gold produced each year in peru on a flight into the area called mighty strong look out the window at all but. When. We arrived to. The regions capital in a gold mining. Is wanted. An estimated 30000 illegal miners work in modern day that the u. S. Chances are you might find some of them here to sell gold or buy equipment i stopped in to one of the shops to look around at a place called amazon gold and right we walk in theres a sign this is going to order me to buy gold and as i exchange my money there was a little scale right in front of me still had some gold dust on it from past exchanges but this sign was removed as soon as our camera was spotted. Her to my mom who is also a place in transition while many of its roads are still dirt paths the new intro she and highway his opened up the area to the wider world people come from all over the country to work the golf fields here miles Luis Ferdinand. Directs the carnegie amazon mercury ecosystem project hes been studying gold money toxic legacy in the amazon since 2000. So now miners have better access to the remote force they can get their equipment there everythings easier because of that highway everythings easier its essentially part of the perfect storm that is mother. So not only do you have a brand new highway that makes transport easier you have record high gold prices and the preexisting condition of extreme poverty. Tell me about this illegal gold mining what is a process where really on the edge between the amazon in the indies and a roget and over millions of years has worn down the rocks of the andes which are gold rich and all that sediment has washed down the river. Next stop a mining area near look pumpa but that can be dangerous for an outsider. The only way into this spot is on the back of a motorbike. The going is tough. And. Makeshift bridges dont always hold up. As we get closer to trees give way to something hard to grasp. Impossible to put into words. And so where we are now should be rain forest get the rain but the forest is missing having done so much work in the areas that have perceived rain forest it really pains me to see this the only way to get a handle on the devastation is to under. Stand how illegal miners get to the gold. They start by clearing the trees so the process is one thats very very primitive. You use High Pressure water hoses and blast it out. Of water dissolves the soil removing anything in it thats organic you concentrate it using sluices which kind of looks like a slide where you run a slurry of the sediments over carpets. Which captures the tiny flecks of gold that you find in the sediments the process can turn primary rain forest into this in a matter of days. Something in the bud this is president of a Small Community of miners who work them on one river nearby even she was disturbed by the level of destruction other miners had done to this land yet i fatty if another. Better take one if it or not but mining does more than strip of forest bare miners bring in mercury to extract those tiny flecks of gold. Mercury has a very unique characteristic of binding with gold forming an amalgam for a minor its almost like magic if theres any question as to whether or not this area was contaminated with mercury the answer is right here. The film amazon gold documented miners working with mercury at a mine deep in the rainforest people are stepping into mercury people are stepping into that mix of sediment mercury and water and stopping on it like you would grapes. Because you need all those little pieces of gold to touch the mercury to be able to capture it manu any miner john valdez works with mercury almost every day in court youll get into the. It is. Because you can you can bet that i dont know. I dont have the money. To look at it it looked ok for you because you dont know yet that the. Miners can also be exposed to mercury vapors thats because once they extract or malcolm they have to burn off the mercury to get to the gold so these miners are touching mercury and theyre breathing mercury one of the Health Effects so the top american way that these miners are exposed to is extremely toxic especially when you breathe it. In starts to a fact that liver kidneys the digestive system and starts to affect the Central Nervous system. Today the money miners arent working because of the rain but jumbo of those showed the equipment he used just 2 days ago to burn mercury off a piece of gold. Everything weve been saying its for this is about 3 grams of gold which translates into 100. 00 which the average worker here could make in about 3 days. Thats a lot of money. The average for worker makes less than 200. 00 a month that lure of gold is changing the face of the amazon as jungle is replaced by mining camps like this magnets for crime underage prostitution and poverty. Symbols of gold at any cost. In 2013 hunting images of the toll illegal mining had taken on the proving amazon went viral the video was taken by the carnegie airborne observatory a high tech plane developed by greg as nerve from the carnegie Institutions Department of global ecology. What is it about these mining activities that are so destructive from lets say from an environmental perspective 1st coal miners not only remove the forest to go down below the soil surface down into what would be called the mineral soil below the biologically active part of the soil so deep in the soil that there isnt a science to tell us that theres forest could ever recover. The devastation exposed from above was dramatic but it was also only part of the story the aircraft but south fitted with all sorts of Cool Technology but how did you use some of that technology to 0 in on what was happening in terms of gold mining yeah one of the key technologies on board the plane is a Laser Imaging system what it does is we fire laser beams out of the bottom of the plane the lasers can penetrate all the way down to the forest floor and so what we end up doing is we end up imaging the forest in very high fidelity 3 d. Most of the work that had been done on this gold mining problem was using satellites that see some of the larger mines we started finding that there was a much larger contribution from the thousands of small Mining Operations that werent known and suddenly we had a problem to report the rate of gold mining expansion tripled after the 2008 global recession if you are on a typical amazon river before seems like its intact all around you but this is that same river that we just were on in the boat. When we peel the forest back we reveal the ground which is shown on the right here and what we see here are gold Mining Operations there are by and large theyre said back from the rivers edge so that they are being executed clandestinely the observatory also has a one of a kind spectrometer which can detect chemicals in the forest below including mercury our system is unique that it can measure 420. 00 channels of light all at the same time from the ultraviolet to the visible part of the spectrum that we see in to the infrared into the short wave infrared its ability to do that gives us access to a key scientific breakthrough which is the ability to measure chemicals in the environment because chemicals shine in different wavelengths of the spectrum. This video from the observatory shows one of the large mining areas in the tunnel part a buffer zone heres how the spectrometer sees that same mining area so where its blood red thats where the mercury pollution is most intense so its basically like a signature of contamination severe contamination and then these areas are porous that have no mercury in them and these are also illegal mining activities these large cleared areas all of this in. Illegal while the spectrometer can see mercury contamination from the sky Luis Ferdinand is studying where mercury goes on the ground. Where else does this matter and because the mercury is dumped into the rivers and lakes it dan gets into the food chain bacteria in the water convert the mercury into something even more toxic than organic compound called methylmercury which is easily absorbed in the digestive system mercury unlike many other pollutants magnifies every time it goes from one link in that food chain to the next so a fish at the top of the food chain in a contaminated region can have mercury levels millions or tens of millions of times higher than the water in which they swim where does that fish and up in many cases it ends up on the dinner plate of people that live hundreds of miles downstream from. The east for the numbers and this team attested to hair samples of more than a 1000 people throughout the model of the the u. S. More than 75 percent had levels above the limit is considered safe by the Environmental Protection agency some as high speed 33 times the limit. In this little. One. As a legal case because. They. Can look at this one most. Of the time if you can vary. Over time mercury impacts the Central Nervous system it could cause problems with vision hearing and memory at high levels it can cause brain damage to unborn babies if you talk to minors you say hey this is a problem how do they usually respond usually. They dont believe us they dont see the immediate effects because the type of exposure that you see here is a chronic one. By 2012 the price of gold was over to 1500. 00 an ounce in illegal mining had eaten away more than 100000 acres of proven rain forest in madrid videos alone. The peruvian government decided to get tough troops went into mining areas and look camps and equipments the strikes were part of a more type wrong strategy according to her nest told as luna a former advisor to proof ministry of the environment the study g m involved Police Operations and the prosecution of the orse offenders and it involved. Financial intelligence to connect the dots in follow the money in see who are the big bosses the crackdown led to violent clashes between miners and police but it didnt stop illegal mining they sent in the military thousands of police what impact to that its been a very temporary. Its so profitable that you can loose cover 1000000. 00 in machinery and 2 weeks later joined back in business it is that profitable this strategy also includes a process of legalizing some Mining Operations outside of protected areas but only if miners can prove they have proper permits and a plan to deal with the Environmental Impact it is impossible for many of them in thats the other part if people are never going to be able to be formal to tell them and start dealing with the. Techno also visited proves ministry of the environment in lima so there is this formalization process how are the miners responded to this in some way well in some not so would because sure it is more easy to work outside of the world for because its more a trip that is why we need to have very clear ways for describe to me these interdiction to crack down on some of these areas how was it how does it go in some way good but on the earth it is very difficult to maintain that kind of interdiction because we cannot go eat every day so sometimes we pull out these people from the 4 b. And so on in 2 or 3 weeks there are coming back to the same place why cant you do it every day why cant you come back every 3 weeks because they are all for do seem some ways to avoid the actual mishal for example in some places in the buffer zone they were there working by night is inside the tumble part of buffer zone. It has been the target of more than one military interdiction yet our cameras caught this current Mining Operation at the pompa in broad daylight many of the real noble remains our allies of recently alabang in the rug not the corruption in the air not on the tory want to provide seeing the fulfillment of the role in the service we need to show to good people but there was subsidies ne they for miserably failed to put enough sheen even small parts of the start the the Big Government self approved at the moment of a total abandonment of the ne should i left the ministry over 6 months ago wanted to leave the ministry i live the ministry because of a buck tong. From government in terms of Environmental Standards they approved a new law that weakens the ability to meet of the ministry of environment to both create protected areas in go after one of the transgressions i was there to help not to be part of recent soil left techno also traveled into the heart of the tumble part to National Reserve its a place so protected that we had to register at 2 control stations on the way. Yet even the park guards seemed overwhelmed. Now with an e. C. M. But i asked about what. We saw miners working the river just a short distance away from the 2nd control station yuri torres was our guide on this journey into the reserve. He know makes his living by helping people experience the breathtaking beauty of the rain forest. He knows the rain for so well he spots a saddleback tamarind monkey with a baby on its back during our interview with torres used to make his living off the jungle as a gold miner 10 s of them either you dont really care about 4 east or 3 tours his father and his brothers still make their living as illegal gold miners and you talk to them about the dangers about the environment yes they do its a big big deal do you worry about your father and your brothers as minors yes yes they do i worry about the real ones who are family if they dont mind what i did. Was very sad its such beyond words were talking over some of the most biological a diverse forests birth places where you could spin to for our worse what she just whats taking place in one branch of 13 in the way the light of the sun shines and Different Things done buses in the school way. Become better because of that i am absolutely convinced that human beings of our right to nature it makes us stronger. So phil youve traveled a lot on a lot of research in that region but this was the 1st time that you had seen this and these areas how did it affect you emotionally ive seen it from the plane anytime i fly into this area and ive always heard about it but to actually see it firsthand was unbelievable really made me want to do something and make sure that people know how big of an issue this is i have to tell you to feel i mean just learning about this strikes a very emotional chord for me too because this. My part of the world not peru but bolivia and bolivia is part of this equation here i mean there is a lot of mining activity gold mining in bolivia as well but the issues that are going on with the magnitude of the illegal activity in peru has been spilling over into bolivia so theres a lot of gold contraband thats going through people to get border and were getting export it kind of under the radar which is really really crazy its a huge issue about our about 3000000000. 00 an ounce of gold going through believe shoojit is this similar to or more complicated than say blood diamonds like as a consumer what can i do to make sure im not contributing to the problem if i wear gold jewelry you know the advantage of the diamond problem it is just this dress to go on the ground but you can actually track it down and you can figure out based on its chemistry where it came from with gold its a lot more difficult to do because a lot of the gold gets exported it gets all melted together so you could have gold from prove mixed with gold from croatia and all of that could make a necklace found that story really opened my eyes so thank you for that really sobering but important be sure to check it so next time join techno is we bring you more stories from the field of science. 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