The Modern Mining of Earth

Earth is definitely being mined on a massive scale.

I will give you examples of mining activities I have come across in my research, primarily in tracking places in alignment with each other.

The following examples are representative of what is out there to find with regards to what these mining operations look like, and the resulting devastation and degradation that comes along with it.

I am going to start with examples of phosphate mining.

Phosphates are derived from phosphorus, and phosphates are used in the production of phosphate fertilizer; calcium phosphate nutritional supplements for animals; and used to make chemicals for use in industry.

Also, it is important to note that white phosphorus is used in making bombs and other incendiary munitions.

I found this example in Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean.

Kiribati was rich in phosphates historically, but commercially viable phosphate deposits have long-been depleted through mining.

This was an historical picture of what the island of Banaba, the furthest west island in Kiribati, looked like before, and after, it was mined for phosphates.

For 80-years, what became known as the British Phosphate Commission in 1919 – from the Pacific Phosphate Company which started phosphate mining there in 1900 – exploded ,bulldozed, and crunched Banaba for its phosphate, which was then exported to Australia to feed Australia’s crops and livestock.

The British Mining Commission also managed the extraction of phosphate from Nauru and Christmas Island.

Nauru was part of German New Guinea, which was part of the German Colonial empire, and existed from 1884 to 1919.

The Germans purchased the Marshall Islands from Spain in 1885, and the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Marianas Islands from the Spanish in 1899.

In 1888, the Germans annexed the island of Nauru to the Marshall Islands protectorate.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, Germany was first to give up all of its territorial assets around the world, including the island of Nauru, which then went under a joint-trusteeship of the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

In 1919, the three trustees signed the Nauru island agreement, which entitled them to the phosphate of Nauru through the British Phosphate Commission.

Today, Nauru is the third smallest country in the world after Vatican City and Monaco.

Interestingly, at one time the island Republic of Nauru had was the second-richest nation in the world by GDP per capita from the mining of its phosphate reserves.

The island’s phosphate reserves were exhausted in the 1990s, and it has become a tax haven and money-laundering center to earn income.

The British Phosphate Commission also operated on Christmas Island.

Christmas Island is located southwest of Singapore and northwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

According to our historical narrative, it received its name from Captain of the “Royal Mary”, William Mynors of the British East India Company, because he sailed past it on December 25th of 1643.

Phosphate was discovered on Christmas Island by Scottish naturalist Sir John Murray.

Murray had a strong interest in coral reefs and sought the assistance of the British admiralty to get specimens.

He received specimens from Christmas Island in 1887 that contained calcium phosphate, and he urged the British government to annex what was described as an uninhabited island, which it formally annexed in 1900, and the island was administered from Singapore.

In February of 1891, Murray and George Clunies-Ross, who established a settlement on the island, were granted a 99-year-lease by the British government to exploit the mineral and timber resources, which they then transferred to their Christmas Island Phosphate Company.

Indentured labor to mine the phosphate was brought in from Singapore, Malaya, and China.

Japan occupied the island during World War II.

Christmas Island became an Australian-territory in 1958.

Next, I am going to look at phosphate mining in the Western Sahara.

Western Sahara is a disputed territory, and classified as a non-self-governing territory by the United Nations.

It is claimed by, and de facto administered by Morocco, in on-going dispute with the native inhabitants, the Sahrawis, who want self-governance.

Vast phosphate deposits are mined at Bu Craa, southeast of Laayoune, the capital of Western Sahara, where abundant, pure phosphate deposits lie near the surface.

For over 40-years, a Moroccan state-owned company has exported phosphate from the Western Sahara region.

It produces about 2.5 million tons of phosphates each year.

Aided by the longest conveyor belt in the world, which travels 61-miles, or 98-kilometers, phosphates are shipped from Bu Craa to Laayoune…

…where massive ships transport it around the world.

Now, I will cover different kinds of mining operations I have encountered in my research.

In South American, I encountered the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela.

The Orinoco Mining Arc and other areas in Venezuela have the 2nd-highest gold reserves in the world, and 32 certified gold fields.

Interesting to note the state of affairs in Venezuela today from having been the wealthiest country in South America not that long ago.

In Colombia, there is a considerable amount of gold-mining in and around Zaragoza..

For one, the El Limon Mine near Zaragoza is a high-grade gold mine and mill…

…but the area surrounding Zaragoza has four other gold mines, three of which are active.

The El Silencio mine was in production for over 150-years, and is no longer being mined.

Also, Colombia has the largest coal-resource-base in South America, and is a major coal player globally.

With reserve estimates ranging between twelve- and 60-billion tons, Colombia exports more than 90% of its production annually, making it the world’s 5th-largest coal exporter.

Colon in Panama, a city and seaport located beside the Caribbean Sea, near the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, has mining operations nearby.

Here are two examples of mining operations in this part of Panama.

The Cerro Petaquilla Mill in Colon is a surface-mining operation, with copper as its primary commodity, and gold, molybdenum and silver as secondary outputs.

The Molejon Gold Project was west of Colon, and located close to the Caribbean coast.

It was said to have produced 100,000 ounces of high-grade gold annually from 2010 until its closure in 2015.

When the mining company that developed the project completely abandoned it in 2015, it left behind workers with unpaid wages and environmental issues unfixed.

Now on to mining examples in other parts of the world.

First stop, Sweden.

There are two iron ore mines in Lapland, in northern Sweden.

One is Kiruna, the largest and most modern underground iron ore mine in the world.

It first opened in 1898.

Iron ore is also mined at Gallivare in northern Sweden.

The Iron Ore Line, a 247-mile, or 398-kilometer, long railway connects Kiruna and Gallivare to Narvik.

The Iron Ore Line opened in 1888.

The iron ore of the Kiruna and Gallivare mines was an important factor in the European theater of World War II, with both sides seeking to have control of northern Sweden’s mining district.

I found the Grib Diamond Mine in Archangelsk Oblast, one of the largest diamond mines in Russia and in the world, but this map marks other diamond deposits in eastern Russia as well.

The Grib Dimond Mine has estimated reserves of 98.5 million carats of diamonds, and annual production capacity of 3.62 million carats.

This map shows the locations of Soviet forced labor camps of the Gulag.

Most of them served mining, timber and construction works.

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Stalin’s dicatorship from the 1920s until the mid-1950s.

An estimated 15 – to 18-million people passed through these brutal hard-labor camps, with an estimated 1.5-million deaths as a result of the camps.

The majority of Gulag prisoners were innocent people locked up for a broad variety of political reasons, held alongside criminal prisoners.

The Yamal Peninsula has been in the news in recent years because of the appearance of huge sinkholes, starting with one that appeared in 2014.  By 2015, five more had developed.

Learning about the appearance of sink holes here is where I first heard about this place.

Makes me wonder if the ground underneath it has been mined?

Norilsk is the world’s northernmost city with a population of more than 100,000, with permanent inhabitants at 175,000, and the second-largest city inside the Arctic Circle.

The official founding date of Norilsk is 1935, and then it was expanded as a settlement for the Norilsk mining-metallurgic complex, and then subsequently became the center of the Norillag system of Gulag forced-labor camps, which existed from June of 1935 to August of 1956.

On May 29th of 2020, the largest oil spill in modern Russian history took place in Norilsk, when about 22,000 tons, or 21,000-cubic-meters, of diesel fuel spilled out of a storage tank. The spill was blamed on permafrost, and contaminated 135-square-miles, or 35-square-kilometers, for which the company paid a $2-billion fine.

Also, the smelting of the nickel ore is directly responsible for severe pollution, typically coming in the form of acid rain or smog, and some estimate the 1% of the world’s sulphur dioxide emission comes from Norilsk’s nickel mines.

I found the Kupol gold and silver mine on the Chukchi Peninsula, the easternmost peninsula of Asia.

The mine is situated over the Kayemraveem ore belt, which contains both high-quality gold and silver.

The mineral deposits are estimated to hold 4.4 million ounces of gold and 54.2 million ounces of silver, on top of 1.72 million inferred ounces of gold, and 22.2 million inferred ounces of silver.

Moving along to North America, Nome on the western coast of Alaska was incorporated in April of 1901, and at one time was the most populous city in Alaska.

The story goes that gold was discovered on Anvil Creek there in 1898 by “three lucky Swedes.”

News of the discovery was said to have reached the outside world that winter, and that by 1899, Nome had a population of 10,000 people and the same year, the area was first organized as the “Nome Mining District.”

Also in 1899, gold was found in the beach sands for dozens of miles along the coast at Nome, spurring the stampede to new heights.

Charles D. Lane, a millionaire mine owner, was recognized as a founder of Nome.

He was born in Palmyra, Missouri, in 1840, and moved to California with his father in 1852.

He got involved in the mining industry, developing successful mines in Idaho, California, and Arizona, before hearing of the first gold strike in Nome in 1898.

Gold mining has been a major source of employment and revenue for Nome on through to the present day.

Gold was discovered in Anchorage, Alaska, in the 1880s, and was said to have turned the region into a mining area overnight.

Over the following years, several mines were established in the area producing hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold, with Anchorage becoming an active gold mining center.

Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, is located in the Gastineau Channel…

…and the Alaskan Panhandle, the southeastern portion of Alaska, bordered to the east by the northern part of British Columbia.

Juneau is unique as a state capital for not having roads connecting it to the rest of the state. All transportation-related activities are by air and sea only.

Vehicles are transported to Juneau by barge or the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry System, which serves communities in Southeast Alaska with no road access, and also transport people and freight.

The city is said to be named after a gold prospector from Quebec named Joe Juneau.

What we are told is that after the California Gold Rush, miners migrated up the Pacific coast in search of other gold deposits.

In 1880, mining engineer George Pilz from Sitka, which was formerly under Russian rule, offered a reward to any local native Alaskan who could lead him to gold-bearing ore.

Pilz received information that prompted him to direct prospectors Joe Juneau and Richard Harris to the Gastineau Channel to Snow Slide Gulch at the head of Gold Creek, where they found nuggets as big as “peas and beans.”

Shortly thereafter a mining camp sprang up, and shortly after that, so many people came looking for gold, that the camp became a village.

This is said to be a photo of Juneau in 1887.

Major mining operations in the Juneau Mining District prior to World War II included the Treadwill Mine, owned and operated by a man named John Treadwell, southeast of Juneau on Douglas Island.

In its time, it was the largest hard-rock gold mine in the world, employing 2,000 people, and producing over 3-million Troy ounces of gold between 1881 and 1922.

The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of northern Yukon between 1896 and 1899.

Same kind of story as the other places I have mentioned – as soon as word about the discovery of gold in the Klondike reached Seattle and San Francisco, it triggered a stampede of prospectors, immortalized in photos like this of the long-line waiting to cross the Chilkoot Pass, a high-mountain pass between the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains between Alaska and British Columbia.

The Minto Mine is an open-pit copper and gold mine located 149-miles, or 240-kilometers, north of Whitehorse, beginning production in 2007…

…and there are numerous mining claims in the Yukon Territory as well.

The Peace River Region of which Dawson Creek is a part has an extensive coal-mining industry, centered in the municipality of Tumbler Ridge.

There are at least five major mining projects here, with the Murray River Mine developed starting in 2017 as an underground metallurgical coal mine.

Edmonton, the capital city of the Province of Alberta, is North America’s northernmost metropolitan area, with a population over 1-million.

Known as the “Gateway to the North,” Edmonton is the staging area for large-scale oil sands projects in northern Alberta…

…and large-scale diamond-mining operations in the Northwest Territories.

The Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan is best known for its substantial uranium deposits.

Manitoba is also home to several active mines.

The area has high-grade zinc and copper deposits in what is called a VMS, or “Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide” deposit.

Manitoba also produces 100% of Canada’s cesium, lithium, and tantalum, minerals used in such things as electronics, specialized batteries, and jet engine components.

Sudbury, officially Greater Sudbury, is the largest city in Northern Ontario.

Nickel, and copper ore was discovered in Sudbury in 1883, the same year as its founding, during the construction of the transcontinental railway.

The Jesuits also arrived here in 1883, and established the Sainte-Ann-des-Pins Mission.

The Murray Mine, where there was a high concentration of nickel-copper ore, was said to have been the first mine established, also in 1883, with its discovery credited to a blacksmith in the railway construction gang.

It was mined during different periods of time between 1883 and 1971.

In its history, Sudbury has been a major world leader in nickel mining.

Mining and mining-related industries dominated the economy here for much of the 20th-century, and has expanded to emerge as the major retail, economic, health, and educational center for northeastern Ontario.

I have also looked into mining in the state of Vermont

For one, gold prospecting has been happening in Vermont since the “Vermont Gold Rush” of the 19th-century.

A San Francisco 49er-miner named Matthew Kennedy discovered gold at Buffalo Creek in Plymouth, Vermont, and by 1855, a gold rush was underway in Plymouth and nearby Bridgewater, both of which are close to Rutland, of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad.

We are told the exact same thing happened in Vermont that we are told about the other gold rushes: one person found gold, then another, and soon people were swarming to the brooks and rivers of Vermont with dreams of getting rich.

Apparently each year, more gold is revealed from erosion all over the state, with the most well-known site still being Buffalo Creek near Plymouth, where the whole thing was said to have started.

Also in Vermont, starting in the early 19th-century, high-quality marble deposits were found in Rutland, and in the 1830s, a large-deposit of nearly solid marble was found in West Rutland.

We are told that by the 1840s, small firms had begun excavations, but that marble quarries proved profitable only after the arrival of the railroad in 1851.

Marble is a type of limestone used as a stone building material since antiquity, like in the Pantheon in Rome pictured here.

The Pantheon was said to have been built as a Roman Temple between 113 AD and 125 AD.

Why is it that marble quarries look like the huge stone blocks were pre-cut, like a long time ago?

This is what the Vermont Danby Quarry looks like:

Other examples are the marble quarries of Carrara in Italy…

…at this marble quarry in Afyon, Turkey…

…and this one in Victoria Brazil.

Could so-called marble quarries actually be ancient marble infrastructure?

Next, I am going to take a look at mining in the Wadi Fira region of the African country of Chad, which has large deposits of gold-bearing quartz, as well as deposits of natron, uranium, silver and diamonds.

The thing is, most of the mining in Chad is small-scale due to the lack of foreign investment because of political and cultural instability.

In Sudan, located east of Chad, there are more than 40,000 gold-mining sites, and about 60 gold-processing companies operating in Sudan.

It looks like Sudan’s resources have been developed in a way that Chad’s has not, in spite of both countries having the same issue of political and cultural instability since independence from Britain in 1956.

I also looked for mining on the Maldives, an island republic in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Indian subcontinent.

Now at first glance, you wouldn’t associate mining with a place that looks like this.

This is the capital of the island nation of the Maldives, Male, on Male Atoll.

But I did find mining activity ~ coral mining!

Coral mining can take place anywhere coral is available in a convenient location, usually occurring at low tide, and is done by either using dynamite…or iron bars to manually to retrieve the coral by breaking-up the larger corals into smaller pieces that can easily be carried to shore.

However it is extracted, the results are loss of biodiversity, and erosion and land retreat.

In my last “Short and Sweet” I looked at the undersea coal mines of Takashima Island and Hashima Island in Nagasaki Prefecture at the southernmost tip of Japan.

These coal mines were critical in Japan’s rapid industrialization and rise as a military power during the period in Japan’s history known as the Meiji Restoration between 1868 and 1889.

I found a history of foreign involvement, particularly in the form of Thomas Glover, a Scottish merchant and agent for the British Multinational Conglomerate Jardine Matheson, who arrived in Nagasaki in 1859, who, among other things, was instrumental in developing the coal industry of these islands.

…and foreign investment and forced labor when I was researching these Japanese coal mines.

There is considerable mining activity of all kinds in Australia as well.

I am going to provide just a few of many examples.

Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory, covers an area that is 7,646 square miles (or 19,804 kilometers).  Besides its incredible biodiversity, land-forms, and river systems, one of the most productive uranium mines in the world is surrounded by the park, shown in the map as the Ranger Mineral Lease.

Aboriginal people have occupied this land continuously for 40,000 years, and approximately half of the land of Kakadu is aboriginal.

Cairns was the largest city serving a number of historic gold fields in North Queensland.

As a matter of fact, there are a LOT of historic and currently operating gold fields throughout the whole Australia.

And that’s just gold mining!

The Ajana District in Western Australia used to have 48 operating lead and copper mines.

.

Sir Augustus Charles Gregory was an English-born explorer and surveyor of Australia.

He discovered the location of the lead outcroppings of what became the first mine there, the Geraldine Mine, in 1848.

The Geraldine mine was in operation by 1849.

This is what we are told.

The ruins here were of what was called the “Lynton Convict Hiring Depot,” which provided the convict labor used to work the Geraldine mine.

The buildings here were said to include a store, bakery, depot, well, lock-up, hospital, lime kiln and administration block that were said to have begun in 1853, and that no sooner were they finished in 1856 than the depot closed because of the harsh living conditions and transportation problems.

This was a cobblestone floor found at the Geraldine mine, said to have been where the convict miners broke up the ore, to pick out the highest-grade galena, which is the primary ore of lead, and contains silver as well.

I don’t know, what do you think? Did Charles D. Lane in Alaska; Augustus Gregory in Australia; and Thomas Glover in Japan belong to the same club?

While mining has long-existed, I don’t think the Earth was mined to the extent that it has been in the last one- to two-hundred years as seen in the examples I have shared in this video.

I think the mining we see in our modern history was directly-connected to the activities of the historical reset happening in the 1800s, and that the Earth’s new Controllers knew exactly where to go to mine the resources and restart the original infrastructure, like railways, needed to create and run their New World, and they got incredibly wealthy and powerful in the process.

The destruction and devastation resulting from these mining operations take place on many levels – from physically destroying and polluting the environment; to destroying lives from the historical forced labor used to work the mines; to the economic and social impact on remote communities that depend on mining for jobs and then get left with no mine and an environmental degradation.

In the end, only a few receive the benefits, and then those few go looking for more.

I don’t think it is just about money for them, but it definitely plays a part.

I also think modern mining and the extraction of other resources is ultimately about power and domination by the few over the many.

They don’t care about us and they don’t care about life.

They have just cared about their New World Agenda and themselves.

Let’s hope their time is ending!