It’s been a while since we’ve written about the proposed Pebble open-pit copper/gold mine in southwest Alaska. In January 2007 one of the world’s biggest mining companies, Rio Tinto, increased it’s ownership stake in Northern Dynasty Minerals to almost 20%, a clear sign that they are banking on ultimate approval of the Pebble mine by […]
It would probably surprise a lot of folks – especially here in West Virginia – that the world’s biggest exporter of coal is… Australia. Strip mines have been growing rapidly in the Upper Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, bringing some painful transformations as local economies lose diversity and become dominated by resource extraction. […]
SkyTruth just posted a small gallery of images showing growth of the Fort Knox open-pit gold mine, north of Fairbanks, from 2003 to 2007 (thanks to Google Earth for adding historical imagery). The mine opened in 1994, and in 2007 received approval from the state of Alaska to expand their operation to include a cyanide […]
Yesterday a federal court of appeals temporarily blocked construction of a proposed 2,000-foot-deep open-pit gold mine on public lands in Nevada. Barrick Gold Corporation’s Cortez Hills Mine is now on hold until the U.S. Bureau of Land Management revises its environmental impact analysis. The court ruled that BLM failed to adequately analyze the potential for […]
SkyTruth, in partnership with Appalachian Voices, documented the impact of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) over a 59-county area in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia by mapping the extent of mountaintop removal mining over a 30 year period using satellite imagery. The historical record shows a 250% increase in MTR occurring over the last […]