Frozen arsenic a miner miracle - Canada

Yellowknife — Deep underground, nearly 100 metres under the Canadian Shield, a slick, greyish-brown sludge seeps through a concrete bulkhead blocking off a chamber in an old gold mine.

With a yellow shaft of light from his miner's lamp, Bill Mitchell points out the tiny stalactites hanging from the rock overhead and the oozy pools gathering underfoot.

"That's fairly nasty," he says. "That slimy stuff — that's water that's leached out, probably carrying a fairly high degree of arsenic."

Since its first brick was poured in 1948, millions of ounces of gold have come from the cold, damp depths of Yellowknife's Giant gold mine in the Northwest Territories. Along with the precious yellow metal came huge amounts of toxic arsenic.

The gold is almost gone and Royal Oak Mines, the last owner to fully operate the mine, is long bankrupt.

But the arsenic remains — 237,000 tonnes of it — and for a decade northerners have worried about the immense underground stockpile of poison along the shore of Great Slave Lake.

http://theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030803.wmine803/BNStory/National/

http://www.geocities.com/darkerxdarker

we are fightiong like hell to prevent an arsenic copper mine here in WI. and i bet we have a shit more water here in the land of MORE than 10,000 lakes.