USA/MT: Butte – Berkeley Pit
The Berkeley Pit is a former open-pit copper mine in Butte, Montana. It was one of the largest open pit mines in USA in 1950s, when over 1 billion tons of rock material containing copper, silver, and gold was extracted here, resulting in 320 million tons of actual copper ore, a truly insane amount! Eventually, the ground water filled the pit and highly toxic heavy motels seeped into the water, making the mind one of the largest sites of toxic waste in the world – arsenic, cadmium, copper, zinc, and lead. The water is more acidic then lemon juice or gastric acid! The water is so bizarre that some new species of weird bacteria were discovered here. The water is now being constantly pumped out and purified to make sure it doesn’t rise too high and then gets into the water table, polluting half of Montana and Idaho.
