Copper

What the Ojibwe Knew About America's Lost Copper Mines
Last Cartographer and Ageden Pro

Now I wonder if maybe The Sea People had an advanced civilization living in the far north, or maybe in Doggerland / Atlantis, and they were sending ships across the Atlantic and through the Great Lakes to get this copper. That sounds kind of nuts, but if it wasn't The Sea People, then where did all the copper go?

I posted about upper Michigan copper mines before.

For more Copper posts, click on the Copper label.

Chile Mine Disaster

El Teniente New Level Mine, Chile

One miner is dead and five more are missing. Aljazeera has the story. The mine is located in the Andes Mountains about 50 miles south-southeast of Santiago. More posts about copper mining here.

Battle of Trafalgar

HMS Victory Copper Bottom

Liz goes for a cruise on the River Tawe and picks up some tidbits:

Three facts from my trip: Swansea has the second biggest tide in the world; the battle of Trafalgar was won thanks to the copper-bottomed boats of the British Navy, the copper having been produced in Swansea; and the only known occasion when yellow fever was transmitted in the UK was when a number of infected mosquitoes travelled to Swansea from Cuba with a cargo of copper ore.

Liz, Swansea and the River Tawe are all in Wales. Have I posted anything about Yellow Fever before? More than I realized. 

Termination Shock - Notes Part 2

Notes on the book Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. The book is set in the not-too-distant future.

Part 2 - Louisiana

Part 1

There is some discussion about people in the mining business and the Paguna Mine in Bougainville comes up: "The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons."

Paguna Mine, Bougainville
The central pit is over one mile across.

Excerpted from Wikipedia:

Panguna is one of the largest copper reserves  in the world, having an estimated reserve of one billion tonnes of ore copper and twelve million ounces of gold. The site was at one time the world's largest open-pit copper/gold mine. The mine caused devastating environmental issues on the island, and the company was responsible for poisoning the entire length of the Jaba River, causing birth defects, as well as the extinction of the flying fox on the island. Dissatisfaction with the company led to an uprising in 1988, led by Francis Ona, a Panguna landowner and commander of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. The outcome of the uprising was the Bougainville conflict, between the BRA, who sought secession from PNG, and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. The ten-year conflict resulted in over 20,000 deaths, as well as the eventual closure of the mine on 15 May 1989, and the complete withdrawal of BCL personnel by 24 March 1990. It has remained closed to this day.

There is also an extensive backstory about Willem, one the queen's aides. His family was in Indonesia when WW2 broke out and were imprisoned by the Japanese. Their troubles didn't end when the war did, now we have Sukarno mounting a campaign for independence which meant more chaos and more trouble for, especially for white Europeans.

Giant Sinkhole in Chile

Sinkhole in Tierra Amarilla, Chile

Giant sinkhole appeared over the weekend in the Atacama Desert. There is an underground copper mine in the neighborhood that might have something to do with it. Sinkholes are just weird.

Just for grins I tried locating it on Google Maps and from the relative positions of the buildings and roads, I think I found it.

Sinkhole location in Tierra Amarilla, Chile

Rio Tinto Arizona Copper Mine

Inside the Resolution Copper Mine, 1.3 Miles Underground
Story in the WSJ prompted me to look into this. The temperature at the bottom of the mine shaft is 180 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot for people to survive, much less work, but they've got people down there, so I want to see what their air conditioners look like, and I want to see their electric bill.

Didn't find much about the A/C used here, but Carrier air conditioned the nearby Magma mine back in 1937:

Dr. Willlis H. Carrier, whose invention of air conditioning dates back to July 17, 1902, is shown (at center) with the machine which made large-scale air conditioning feasible - the centrifugal refrigerating machine.

Monaconda

Mystery thing near Warm Springs, Montana. It's five and a half miles away from me on I-90.

On our way East to Iowa a couple of weeks ago, about two hours out of Missoula, I spied this thing. What the heck is it? It's a ways away, so it has got to be big. It looks kind of like a smokestack, but there is nothing else there. I know! It's a monolith, left here by ancient aliens! We're saved! Oh hallelujah! Now wait a minute bucky, there might be a more prosaic explanation.

Anaconda Smelter. C. 1950

A week later, on our way home, we stopped overnight in Butte, with dinner at the Montana Club. I'm wandering around after dinner and I notice this picture hanging on the wall. Golly gee, could that be the same alien monolith we saw on our way east? Yes, it could, and no, it's not an artifact of an ancient civilization. It is the smokestack from the Anaconda Smelter that used to be in Anaconda, Montana, just down the road from Warm Springs. The smelter was demolished in 1981, but the stack was saved. It is nearly 600 feet tall. The Washington Monument would easily fit inside.


Montana Mosaic 10: The Rise and Fall of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company (2006)
    Anaconda built Montana. They were an industrial powerhouse. The Anaconda company is gone from the state, but the poisonous legacy of it's mining operations remains. Montana has the largest EPA superfund site.

Update November 2021 replaced missing video.

Baking to the next level

Richard Hamming

Detroit Steve pokes a yeast cell:

    I've been on a bit of a search kick on foods that have copper affinity. It started with my use of cinnamon, I use it every day in my oatmeal and it is red so I wondered what made it red. Still no idea, but thought it could be copper. Not likely but still. Like Iron for the Irish, I was wondering if it could be possible poisonous in larger accumulated quantities.
    The Irish and iron premise is 8,000 years of isolation on Ireland with a soil devoid of iron, has made the Irish very good at pulling out any available iron in the foods to the point that a diet rich in iron will accumulates to toxic level such that it actually damages our hearts. Thus, giving blood is an important habit and necessary.
    Many foods have affinity to different elements, tobacco for lead and radon, rice has one for arsenic. Basically a strategy for survival for plants is a chemical approach, they are trying to find ways to kill or discourage anything that might eat it.
    The EFSA European Food Safety Authority put out a Scientific opinion on the inability to assess the safety of copper-enriched yeast added for nutritional purposes. I tried yeast additive in college, did not agree with me then.

So this lead to one of my favorite and Tyler's yeast; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
​I was surprised but should not have been by the broad list of research that has been going on with this yeast.​
There is a Database devoted to it!
So I started to read one of the articles.
Right off the bat, it reminding me of the Dr. Strangelove plot.
They are playing around with the yeast to have it use a sugar found in wood. Keep in mind what three concepts I have in mind while reading this: the Richard Hamming story and the Atom bomb (igniting our atmosphere with and atom bomb), second why coal stopped forming (bacteria was able to digest cellulose) and third the garlic mustard in my yard starting to come up (invasive species that take over).
​It is all so unlikely it's funny. First assumption is there is a lot of xylose, I have no idea how much xylose sugar is out there. So this new version of our favorite yeast gets out and starts its fast consumption of all the xylose, what might happen?

I remember reading about a case of iron overload some years ago. The treatment they used then was blood letting. The man took the blood home and poured it on his roses.

Funny Rocks

A "small" piece of copper pulled out of the Adventure mine.

One hammer drill leads to another, and we find ourselves deep underground in an old copper mine in Northern Michigan. Herewith we have a condensed version of Wikipedia's story about Copper Mining in Michigan:

The western portion of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is highly unusual among copper-mining districts, because copper is predominantly found in the form of pure copper metal (native copper) rather than the copper oxides or copper sulfides that form the copper ore at almost every other copper-mining district. The copper deposits occur in rocks associated with the Keweenawan Rift.

The miners sometimes found masses of native copper up to hundreds of tons (fissure deposits). To extract a single mass of copper, miners could spend months chiseling it into pieces small enough to hoist out of the mine. Although they were pure copper, removing the masses took a great deal of effort, and was sometimes not even profitable.

In the 1850s, mining began on stratiform native copper deposits in conglomerates and in basalt lava flows (locally called amygdaloids). Although these deposits tended to be lower-grade than the fissure deposits, they were much larger, and could be mined much more efficiently, with the ore blasted out, hoisted to the surface, and sent to stamp mills located at a different site. Amygdaloid and conglomerate mining turned out to be much more productive and profitable than fissure mining.

A number of copper mines also contained a notable amount of silver, both in native form and naturally alloyed with the copper. Halfbreed is the term for an ore sample that contains the pure copper and pure silver in the same piece of rock; it is only found in the native copper deposits of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Copper mining in the Upper Peninsula boomed, and from 1845 until 1887 (when it was exceeded by Butte, Montana) the Michigan Copper Country was the nation's leading producer of copper. In most years from 1850 through 1881, Michigan produced more than three-quarters of the nation's copper, and in 1869 produced more than 95% of the country's copper.

Annual production peaked in 1916 at 266 million pounds (121,000 metric tons) of copper. By 1968 Michigan's native copper industry was essentially dead, after producing 11 billion pounds (5.0 million metric tons) of copper.

Ferrocene

I'm reading up on iron (because it's magnetic) in Wikipedia and I come across this line:

Among its organometallic compounds is ferrocene, the first sandwich compound discovered.

which basically means nothing to me because half of the words likewise mean nothing, but somebody thought is was worth mentioning that it was the first of its kind.
    Its kind is a sandwich compound, which just means we've got a tomato sandwich (see picture) made with two pumpernickel muffins. The muffins are a little lumpy and are decorated with Hostess Sno Balls, but you get the picture. The red ball in the center is the iron atom, the two lumpy black blobs on either side are rings made of five carbon atoms each, and the silver balls around the outside edge are hydrogen atoms. Here's a different rendition, except they have made a blueberry sandwich.

    Following links to ever more obscure terms (like Ligand and Coordination Complexes) I stumble across this line:

Coordination complexes were known – although not understood in any sense – since the beginning of chemistry, e.g. Prussian blue and copper vitriol. 

    Prussian blue was invented back in 1706 in Germany. It was the first economical blue dye, economical in that it replaced lapis lazuli, a stone mined in Persia, and Indigo, a dye derived from a plant. I remember a story from elementary school about how the first European settlers in North America discovered Indigo, which also became an important blue dye. Oops, wrongo! Indigo had been imported from India since ancient times. Several American colonists tried to grow it. Eliza Lucas Pickney persisted and eventually met with success.
    I've heard of Prussian blue because machinists use it for marking metal and biologists use it for staining specimens for microscope slides. It is also used as an antitode for some kinds of heavy metal poisoning, like radioactive Cesium, which was the culprit in the Goiânia accident in Brazil back in 1987.
    Copper vitriol, also known as copper sulfate is used as fungicide, pesticide and herbicide. Watch out microbes, copper's comin'! It was used to pressure treat wood to preserve it from rotting. It is also used in swimming pools and aquariums.
    So we've been using stuff that we really didn't understand. No surprise there. All that is really interesting, but here's the clincher:

Ferrocene and its derivatives are antiknock agents used in the fuel for petrol engines; they are safer than tetraethyllead, previously used.^[34] It is possible to buy at Halfords in the UK, a petrol additive solution which contains ferrocene which can be added to unleaded petrol to enable it to be used in vintage cars which were designed to run on leaded petrol.^[35] The iron containing deposits formed from ferrocene can form a conductive coating on the spark plug surfaces.

So ferrocene, invented in 1951, can be used to run your hot-rod engine with today's wimpy gasoline. But it you do it will foul your plugs. Still, replacing fouled plugs in better than having to replace the whole damn engine.

Landslide @ Bingham Canyon Copper Mine

April 10, 2013. Photo from Kennecot Utah Copper.

Another IMPORTANT news story that was totally unreported by the big wigs. It's taken almost two weeks to wind it's way to me. Nobody hurt is why. The mining company had monitoring equipment that warned them of impending doom and they shut down operations the day before. The size of the landslide surprised them and buried some equipment. Mine is run by the Rio Tinto company out of Australia. Mine workers were "asked" to take a leave of absence until damage is repaired. Seems to me that repairing the damage is going to be a whole lot like mining as usual, i.e. lots of digging and hauling, so I expect the worker bees will only be out of work until the dirt nerds work out a plan. This is in Utah which is Mormon country, which means this is probably a right-to-work state, which is why we haven't heard from the Union. Mormons are a little odd (to quote W.C. Fields "never trust a man who doesn't drink") but they have a number of good qualities, like being hard workers, so the mine company couldn't ask for a better location. On the other hand I expect someone to concoct a lawsuit based on not being informed of the impending doom and it's impact on the price of the company's stock.

It's a big mine. It produces 1% of the world's copper, or at least it did. Mining and agriculture are similar in that they both suffer from over-production. Farmer has a bumper crop, so does everyone else, there's a glut on the market and price of whatever it is falls through the floor and the farmer goes broke. Same thing with mining. Miner goes into mining because there is a demand for a metal. If he makes a big strike and starts producing more metal the price falls and his vision of riches vanish. So this landslide could be a blessing for the copper industry.

I was at Home Depot looking at copper pipe a couple of years ago and the guy on the floor was telling me that you could probably get more for copper pipe at the scrap yard than Home Depot was charging for it. i.e. You could make money by buying copper pipe at Home Depot and taking it across town to the scrap yard to sell it. I didn't try it, I didn't even look into it. It seemed like sacrilege to me. Besides the price difference was probably only a few cents a pound, so it would have taken a sizable cash outlay to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

Via Tam.