Mountain Treasures

Native gold (photo by California Geological Survey)

Millions of years ago, tremendous forces shaped the world’s mountains. These same forces created deposits of metals, gems and minerals in the earth’s rocks. Today, mountain ranges are the major source of many of the world's most important metals and minerals, including gold, copper, iron, silver and zinc. Look around you. Do you see things made out of metal or minerals? How about your computer? Try to imagine these metals buried deep inside a mountain a few years ago…

Mountains pay a heavy price when we tear them apart to find valuable minerals. Mining pollutes streams and ground water. It destroys natural habitat, often leading to erosion and flooding. It leaves behind dumps of waste and dangerous pits. Mountain communities suffer, too, when their homes and fields are lost or polluted. Mountaintop removal mining in Peru and the USA slices off whole mountaintops and dumps them in the valley below to get to gold, zinc, or coal seams. When this happens, the natural landscape is lost forever. Farms and forests vanish. Streams are buried beneath millions of tons of mining waste.

Mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachian mountains. Click on the image and try to find the two trucks on the road. Hint: they are much smaller than the mining machine. (photo by Lyntha Scott Eiler, Library of Congress)

Can we balance our need for metal and minerals with our need to save the environment? There are ways that everyone can help! Here are the “3 R’s”:

Reduce

Re-use

Recycle

The "quenual" tree forms the world's highest forests, at an elevation of nearly 5,000 meters in the Peruvian Andes. There are very few of these trees left today. (photo by Florencia Zapata)

Do you see the forest or the trees? In ancient times, the mountains of the eastern Mediterranean were covered by a famous forest known as the “Cedars of Lebanon.” Thousands of years ago, these cedars were already being cut and shipped to Egypt and Jerusalem. King Solomon supplied 80,000 loggers to work in the forest and 70,000 to skid the logs to the sea. What has become of the Cedars of Lebanon that once covered nearly 2,000 square miles? Today, only a few small groves are left. Worldwide, mountain forests stretch over 9 million square kilometres, representing 28 percent of the world's closed forest area. Healthy mountain forests protect our water supply. They protect the land from erosion and provide a home to wildlife. They provide food, timber, useful plants, and wilderness values to people. Yet in many parts of the world mountain forests are under threat.

Cloud forests are one of the world's most threatened and beautiful ecosystems. They comb moisture from the clouds and provide food and shelter to people, animals, and plants. Yet, in as little as ten years time, most cloud forests may be gone. They are being cleared for cattle grazing, logged, mined, and dried out by the effects of global warming.

Energy

Mountains are a treasure house of energy for the planet, offering rich troves of wood, coal, water power, and wind energy. Which sources of energy can be used again and again without damaging the mountains? The answer is not always easy.

California's Altamont Pass wind plant produces enough electricity to power the residential part of a city the size of San Francisco. (photo courtesy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Water power and wind power are clean, renewable energy sources, but they don’t always come without cost to the environment. Large dams flood towns and farms in valley bottoms and block the natural migrations of fish. Windmills on mountaintops can take a heavy toll on migrating birds. Still, these energy sources are our best choice for the future, since they rely on the renewable power of the sun – to evaporate water that rains down to form mountain rivers, and to warm the winds that blow over mountaintops.

Would you like to see mountain treasures unfold? Try these links:

Mining on Black Mountain
Professor Roy Silver talks about the unique and threatened resources of Black Mountain in the Appalachian range.

Losing forests in Bolivia
This animation starts in space, high above South America. As we zoom in closer, the national outlines of Bolivia come into view on the map. By focusing on one particular region, we’re able to see effects of deforestation in the equatorial forest. Between 1984 and 2000, intense agricultural development has transformed the forest (1.76 Mbytes, MPEG, NASA).

Wind power animation
Watch an animation that explains how wind power works and promotes its use (US Department of Energy)

Find more great learning resources by searching our on-line guide. Or, click on the keyword to do an automatic search for mountain learning resources related to culture , energy , forests , or mining.