Rolling Stones

extract
13 minutes 40 seconds

A video essay that explores the Canadian Malartic's open-pit gold mine (from extraction to ore processing and its final disposal), focusing on the contrast between rock time and human terraforming.

extract from Field Notes:
Mining Operations, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, 4th of August 2017
We stand above the tree line, on top of the “waste” rock dump piled at the surface of the Osisko Mining Corporation’s Canadian Malartic open-pit. The lack of vegetation here makes this place look like Mars, a rock glacier or even the outcome of a glacier recession. A large area of forested land has been obliterated. The south of the adjacent town has been relocated. Thousands of acres of land were bulldozed. Many cubic miles of rocky material (Porphyry and Greywacke) were drilled and blasted, and tons of ground-rock later hauled to this dump. All, to carve a Dantesque pit into the Earth and gain access to buried gold ores.
Since 2005, the first exploration drill holes, a fleet of giant earthmovers running 24/7, 365 days a year have helped extract an average of 150 000 tons of rocks and process circa 50 000 tons of ore daily. The corresponding volumes of mine waste were (and are being) disposed into nearby waste management facilities: rock waste is disposed into this one - on which we stand; the tailings, containing leftover processing toxic chemical – such as cyanide and sulfuric acid – into ponds (that will be) covered and neutralized with non-acid generating thickened tailings. The usual approach to managing mine waste materials (from digging and processing operations) is to collect and contain them at the point of production, treat the wastes and discard them to the land, water, or air.
After the full production rates are reached, the pit will be approximately 3.7 km long, 900 m wide and 410 m deep, twice the double of its current size and will collect rainwater. This dump will build a mountain of 54 m high and 2.5 km long, covering 450 hectares in area that will eventually be covered with soil and vegetation. The tailing ponds, rendered harmless, will allow indigenous trees to be planted. All the equipment will be gone and buildings dismantled. What will remain will be, Osisko announces, a hill and a water reservoir.
To stand here is thus, literally glimpsing the (building of a huge) uncanny.
Regardless of how large or valuable their natural resource endowments and even the future landscape Osisko announces, the mining industry has distorted perceptions about a safe and healthy environment, contributing to the legitimation of a pervasive influence on geomorphological, biological and socio-economic processes of the region as well as in the ancient geological core and Earth’s body. It is not without irony that the word mining in English has a double meaning. It means both “to dig in the earth for treasure” and “to dig under foundations to undermine them”. The reference to the old tactic of tunneling under enemy fortifications to blow them up might as well be still a good reference here. We know that the mining operations can be harnessed, to soften their impact, yet to poke the planet, we know, does not come only with profits.