If you looked at previous videos, you know by now that oil and natural gas production is a big thing in the Arctic. There's huge reserves of oil and natural gas in the Arctic. Some countries, notably Russia, are really all over it in the production, maybe not so much in the USA. There's controversy, such as in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Norway, of course, has a lot of offshore production. But now I want to turn attention to a related sector of the economy, which is mining, which falls under extraction services, as does the production of oil and natural gas. So the key points here. Yeah, mining, definitely a big economic driver in the Arctic, major operations in Russia, Canada, and the USA. Gold mining, key to the state's economy and the development of the state. Coal mining in Svalbard for over 100 years. But a lot of that is now being discontinued, largely being discontinued. Now, let's turn to Russia first. And I'm just going to provide a few examples of what's going on. Let's talk first about Nornickel, also known as Norilsk nickel, right? Now, what this is, what Nornickel is, is a Russian nickel and palladium mining and smelting company, really big company. And it has a number of operations. The largest one is near the Yenisei river, in the region near the Yenisei river, additional operations on the Kola Peninsula and elsewhere, big company. Now, here is just a photograph of Norilsk nickel plant near the Yenisei river, big, big, big operation. So you see some big smokestacks here and things like that, okay, big operation. Now, nickel palladium, these are very, very important metals, right? We need them, right? Of course, everything comes at a cost, right, nothing comes for free. And that goes for oil and natural gas production, as does mining, right? There are pollution effects of mining, right, environmental impacts. Now, it turns out that Norilsk nickel pollution, well, the company is one of the most polluting companies out there. And it includes acid rain effects and smog, right? Smelting at Norilsk is responsible for as much as 1%, that one plant, of global sulfur dioxide emissions. So there's a lot going on there, right? Heavy metal pollution in the mining area. The city of Norilsk, which is I think around 100,000, has real bad pollution problems. As I was shooting this video, I had read that there had been a major fuel oil leak into river that was coming from the power plant at Norilsk, so there's just yet another issue there. So there's definitely issues here. But of course, in the United States, well, some of the same problems are there. Let's talk briefly about the Red Dog Mine in Alaska, a nickel, lead, and silver mine owned and operated by a Canadian company called Tech Resources, which not owned by the US or US company. It's the world's largest producer of zinc, a very important metal. Now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA, it's the source of more toxic releases than any other facility in the country. Here's a picture of the Red Dog Mine, zinc, lead, and silver, as I mentioned. And you see it's just a huge open pit operation, very, very, very big operation. It's been around for a while. Now, let's turn our attention now to Canada, and I'm going to use the example of the Diavik Diamond Mine. Yes, diamonds are mined in Canada. So what it consists of is four kimberlite pipes in the Northwest Territory of Canada on an island. You find diamonds in what they called kimberlite pipes. Now, the mine is located 220 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, so technically not Arctic. But hey, who's counting? It's close enough. Production began in 2006, which fairly new operation, started out as an open pit mine, but now is all underground. And the mine is accessed via an ice road from Yellowknife. Now, here's an image, or it looks like a high altitude aerial photograph of the mine. And you can see kind of on the right-hand side those two big open pits, but now it is all underground. Just so I have a bit of a trivia question here. I don't expect you to get it, but it's interesting to ask it anyhow. What is the largest diamond found at the mine? And the answer is a 552-carat yellow diamond. That's a pretty darn big diamond, right? Now I don't know a great deal about diamonds, but my understanding is that a yellow diamond is not your best diamond, right? You like a clear diamond colorless diamond or I guess if you really fancy like a blue diamond like the hope diamond, right? Really, really valuable. But nevertheless, a 552-carat yellow diamond is quite the find. Now let's turn attention to gold mining in Alaska. Again, a major industry. A big driver of settlement and exploration of the state. Started out back in about 1870 platters near Juneau. So plaster deposit is basically in alluvium like in riverbanks and things like that, and you just get it your gold leaf. I mean, so you would get a gold nugget or flakes and things like that. But gold is mined all over Alaska both plaster deposits. In Hard Rock, that need to get to drill for it, right? Hard rock mining. Now areas near Fairbanks and Nome is the is the site of the sites of most most of the historical, and current production. But again, there's been mining throughout throughout the state. Here's a blast from the past. Here's a picture of a century old dredge. This is dredging plaster deposits. So it's a big steam powered operation. They'll be a shovel. They'll be a big a bunch of dredge buckets which would dredge out the sand and gravel will go through a series of sluice boxes and the gold, of course is high density. Very heavy would sink to the bottom and it could be could be recovered. I was in the round of the area around council Alaska, maybe 60 miles out of Nome, something like that some years ago where I saw a number of these dredges and all buildings and things like that. Just remarkable to see all that history just lying around these big old steam powered dredges and things like that along Oak Fear Creek. Some of the scientists went out and pan for gold and you can still get a little color in areas like that. But yeah, quite the operation in Nome itself. It seems that one of the things that people do is decorate their front lawns with oldridge. Buckets will take a dredge bucket and then plant, flowers in it. So that seems to be one of the things that is done up there. Here's modern plaster mining. Here's just an image of modern plaster mining operation. So you're basically a big front end loader or whatever kind of machine that he is pickup truck. There's someone else out there and they are just pulling that stuff out and running it through a kind of a big sluice box, so you can see, yeah, discoloring the water. Yeah, it doesn't come for free, right? There is environmental damage or something like that. But of course, this is mining right now. Here's another question. Is recreational gold mining permitted in Alaska? That is if you are a tourist saying going up there, could you pan for gold? And the answer is yes. Yeah, certainly this restrictions on it, but you can do that just like the scientists I was with near recounts of Alaska. Just panning for gold didn't find much, but a little bit of color. But yeah, you can do it with restrictions and it's a popular thing to do. Now, I want to briefly turn attention to coal mining in Svalbard archipelago. That Northeast Greenland is separated from Greenland by frame straight, remember. But coal mining going on there for at least a century, but Norway intends to close the mine. Remember, Svalbard does part of the Kingdom of Norway. The tenance would close the mind who was heavily subsidizing the operations and I guess the argument it was really not feasible to do so anymore. Exception being a smaller deposit used to supply a local power plant, but there's something called the small bar treaty signed in 1920 which allows Russia to continue mining coal in the area and they continue to do it. Here's one of the old abandoned mines. I think this is one of the old abandoned mines in Svalbard, but there's a lot going on there for a long, long, long time. But a lot of it is being shut down, but not all of it. As I mentioned, Russia is still doing operations in there, still mining cold. I provide this one. I think I've shown this figure before somewhere else just showing one of the little choo choo trains that serviced one of the minds. So there's a small steam locomotive. You can see some cars behind it. So well, look, I can see the data on the photograph of 2008 back when I was in that area. There's still pieces of coal lying around that fell off the cars and things like that. I have a little souvenir that I brought home. I hope I did so legally. Looks like nice, high quality coal. But in any case, yeah, there's still activity up there, but a lot of it's being shut down. So I hope at this point that you have a little bit of appreciation of greater appreciation for the mining operations that are occurring in the Arctic. So the Arctic has a lot of oil and natural gas, has a lot of other natural resources in terms of hard rock mining, mining for gold. So this really is a big driver of what's going on in the Arctic. Thank you.
