Rusk County is a county in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census, the population was 14,188. Its county seat is Ladysmith. The Chippewa and Flambeau rivers and their tributaries flow through the county. The land ranges from corn/soybean farms and dairy farms to lakes rimmed with vacation homes to hiking trails through the Blue Hills.
Ladysmith is a city and the county seat of Rusk County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 3,216 at the 2020 census.
Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique that extracts rock or minerals from the earth.
In mining, tailings or tails are the materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of an ore. Tailings are different from overburden, which is the waste rock or other material that overlies an ore or mineral body and is displaced during mining without being processed.
The Berkeley Pit is a former open pit copper mine in the western United States, located in Butte, Montana. It is one mile (1.6 km) long by one-half mile (800 m) wide, with an approximate maximum depth of 1,780 feet (540 m). It is filled to a depth of about 900 feet (270 m) with water that is acidic, about the acidity of beer or tomatoes. As a result, the pit's water is laden with heavy metals and dissolved metals that leach from the rock in a natural process known as acid rock drainage. The dissolved metals include but are not limited to copper, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid.
Acid mine drainage, acid and metalliferous drainage (AMD), or acid rock drainage (ARD) is the outflow of acidic water from metal mines and coal mines.
The Río Tinto is a highly toxic river in southwestern Spain that rises in the Sierra Morena mountains of Andalusia. It flows generally south-southwest, reaching the Gulf of Cádiz at Huelva. The Rio Tinto river has a unique red and orange colour derived from its chemical makeup that is extremely acidic and with very high levels of iron and heavy metals.
Kennecott Utah Copper LLC (KUC), a division of Rio Tinto Group, is a mining, smelting, and refining company. Its corporate headquarters are located in South Jordan, Utah. Kennecott operates the Bingham Canyon Mine, one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world in Bingham Canyon, Salt Lake County, Utah. The company was first formed in 1898 as the Boston Consolidated Mining Company. The current corporation was formed in 1989. The mine and associated smelter produce 1% of the world's copper.
The Bingham Canyon Mine, more commonly known as Kennecott Copper Mine among locals, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine is the largest human-made excavation, and deepest open-pit mine in the world, which is considered to have produced more copper than any other mine in history – more than 19,000,000 short tons. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto Group, a British-Australian multinational corporation. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation which operates the mine, a concentrator plant, a smelter, and a refinery. The mine has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles (1,210 m) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covering 1,900 acres. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 under the name Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine. The mine experienced a massive landslide in April 2013 and a smaller slide in September 2013.
Crandon mine was a mine proposed for northeastern Wisconsin, USA. It was to be situated near the town of Crandon and the Mole Lake Ojibwe Reservation in Forest County. The mine was the center of a multi-decade political and regulatory battle between environmentalists, American Indian tribes, sportfishing groups, and the State of Wisconsin and several large mining corporations. The purchase of the mine site in 2003 by the Sokaogon Ojibwe and Forest County Potawatomi marked a major victory for the tribes and environmental activists, and raised questions about the future of mining, economics, and tribal power in Wisconsin.
Iron Mountain Mine, also known as the Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, is a mine near Redding in Northern California, US. Geologically classified as a "massive sulfide ore deposit", the site was mined for iron, silver, gold, copper, zinc, quartz, and pyrite intermittently from the 1860s until 1963. The mine is the source of extremely acidic mine drainage which also contains large amounts of zinc, copper, and cadmium. One of America's most toxic waste sites, it has been listed as a federal Superfund site since 1983.
In the United States, copper mining has been a major industry since the rise of the northern Michigan copper district in the 1840s. In 2017, the US produced 1.27 million metric tonnes of copper, worth $8 billion, making it the world's fourth largest copper producer, after Chile, China, and Peru. Copper was produced from 23 mines in the US. Top copper producing states in 2014 were Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Montana. Minor production also came from Idaho, and Missouri. As of 2014, the US had 45 million tonnes of known remaining reserves of copper, the fifth largest known copper reserves in the world, after Chile, Australia, Peru, and Mexico.
The Eagle Mine is a small, high-grade nickel mining and copper mining project owned by Lundin Mining. The mine is located on the Yellow Dog Plains in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States. Eagle is the only primary nickel mine in the United States. The mine began production in fall 2014 and is expected to produce 440 million pounds of nickel, 429 million pounds of copper and small amounts of other metals over its estimated mine life (2014-2027).
In-situ leaching (ISL), also called in-situ recovery (ISR) or solution mining, is a mining process used to recover minerals such as copper and uranium through boreholes drilled into a deposit, in situ. In-situ leach works by artificially dissolving minerals occurring naturally in the solid state.
Environmental effects of mining can occur at local, regional, and global scales through direct and indirect mining practices. Mining can cause erosion, sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, or the contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface water by chemicals emitted from mining processes. These processes also affect the atmosphere through carbon emissions which contributes to climate change.
Leviathan Mine is a United States superfund site at an abandoned open-pit sulfur mine located in Alpine County, California. The mine is located on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada at about 7,000-foot (2,100 m) elevation, 6 miles (9.7 km) east of Markleeville and 24 miles (39 km) southeast of Lake Tahoe. The mine site comprises approximately 250 acres (100 ha) of land surrounded by the Toiyabe National Forest, which is only accessible a few months a year. The approximately 22 million tons of sulfur ore-containing crushed rock at the mine are responsible for contaminating the Leviathan and Aspen Creek, which join with Mountaineer Creek to form Bryant Creek which ultimately empties into the East Fork of the Carson River. These water bodies are listed as 303(d) impaired. The site location is seismically active.
Coal mining in Brazil is the country's largest source of non-renewable energy, and is an important part of Brazil's energy economy. Brazil is the tenth largest energy consumer and the third largest in the Western Hemisphere. Coal accounts for approximately 5.8 percent of the country's total primary energy supply. It is the country's largest source of non-renewable energy, followed by nuclear energy, petroleum, and natural gas. Brazil produces about 6 million tons of coal per year, and total coal reserves are estimated at approximately 32.3 billion tons. It is also important in reducing reliance on imported oil and gas.
Mount Polley mine is a Canadian gold and copper mine located in British Columbia near the towns of Williams Lake and Likely. It consists of two open-pit sites with an underground mining component and is owned and operated by the Mount Polley Mining Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Metals. In 2013, the mine produced an output of 38,501,165 pounds (17,463,835 kg) of copper, 45,823 ounces of gold, and 123,999 of silver. The mill commenced operations in 1997 and was closed and placed on care and maintenance in 2019. The company owns 20,113 hectares (201.13 km2) of property near Quesnel Lake and Polley Lake where it has mining leases and operations on 2,007 hectares (20.07 km2) and mineral claims on 18,106 hectares (181.06 km2). Mineral concentrate is delivered by truck to the Port of Vancouver.
The Blue Ledge Mine is an inactive underground copper mine that has been classified as a Superfund Site by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) due to high concentrations of heavy metals. The mine is located approximately 3 miles south of the California–Oregon border in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. It is within the Siskiyou Mountain range, and sits near a summit at about 4,800 feet above sea level. The underground mining excavations span over 2 miles, and it is one of the largest mining operations to have existed in the region.
The Ridgeway mine was a gold and silver open-pit mine near Ridgeway, South Carolina. In its eleven years of operation between 1988 and 1999, it produced 1,500,000 ounces of gold and 900,000 ounces of silver. The mine's two ore bodies are part of the gold-rich Carolina Slate Belt rock package that runs through the upstate Piedmont foothills. The operator of the mine, the Ridgeway Mining Company, is a subdivision of Kennecott Minerals. Kennecott is a subdivision of Rio Tinto which is one of the world's largest mining companies.
