Tens of millions of people — more than live in the entire state of Florida — are now exposed to toxic water runoff from metal mining, a new study has found.

The report lays bare the devastating impacts that can follow a reckless transition to ‘green’ energy, compounding the ecological damage wrought by over 150 years of drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

The researchers found that 23 million people worldwide, as well as 5.72 million in livestock, over 16 million acres of irrigated farmland and over 297,800 miles worth of rivers have been contaminated by mining’s toxic byproducts seeping into the water.

This metal mining includes many so-called ‘rare earth elements’ essential to the manufacture of high-tech electronics, solar cells, wind turbines and all the batteries needed to store sustainable ‘green’ energy (and power electric cars and iPhones).

While the new study focuses on environmental impacts, global metals mining has recently faced shocking lawsuits against major tech firms, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla, over child slavery in the Congo, where 70 percent of the industry’s cobalt is sourced.

‘Rapid growth in global metal mining is crucial if the world is to make the transition to green energy,’ noted Chris Thomas, a zoologist at the University of Lincoln whose specialty is in spatial ecology and threats to the global water supply.

Thomas led the analysis and modelling work for the new study, which was published  today in Science.

Thomas and his colleagues have developed a new database, supported by on-the-ground testing, which now maps the hundreds of square miles’ worth of rivers and floodplains contaminated by these industrial processes across the globe. 

The devastation wrought by this contamination, they found, was widespread, affecting approximately 297,800 miles (479,200 km) of river systems total and over 63,000 square-miles (164,000 sq-km) of floodplains worldwide. 

But, North America stood out as the most affected, at 123,280 miles of tainted river systems, and approximately 10.7 million acres of polluted floodplains. 

But the damage was not much better in South America with 50,766 miles of rivers and over 9.5 million acres of floodplain impacted; nor in Asia with about 37,842 river-miles and about 8.3 million acres of floodplain polluted by metal mining waste.

In terms of potency of local damage, however, the the scientists saved their harshest criticisms for ‘the environmental legacy of historical mining,’ which they said was ‘most problematic in western Europe,’ where long-abandoned old mines have left lasting environmental damage.

‘Much of the estimated global contamination we have mapped is a legacy from the industrial era,’ Thomas said in a press statement. ‘Rightly, modern mining is being encouraged to prioritize environmental sustainability.’ 

The researchers developed a model to predict the spread of contaminants from all known active and inactive metal mines — plus facilities used to seal off hazardous mining waste — with a focus on pollution from lead, zinc, copper, and arsenic.

These potentially harmful contaminants and industrial byproducts can seep into the local water supply, whether transported downstream where the metals are deposited along river beds and floodplains, or otherwise sinks deep into underground aquifers.

Mark Macklin, director of the university’s Lincoln Centre for Water and Planetary Health, who led the international team behind the new research, said he anticipates the new study’s maps and modelling tools will help prevent future reckless mining.

‘We expect that this will make it easier to mitigate the environmental effects of historical and present mining,’ Macklin said.

‘Our new method for predicting the dispersal of mine waste in river systems provides governments, environmental regulators, the mining industry and local communities with a tool that, for the first time, will enable them to assess the offsite and downstream impacts of mining on ecosystem and human health.’

All told, the researchers identified 159,735 abandoned mines and 22,609 active mines — as well as 11,587 mining waste storage facilities and 257 known cases of failed and leaking storage sites. 

The team described the new database in their report as ‘the most comprehensive compilation of metal mine locations to date.’ 

Concerns over just how bad the ecological impact of metal mining for sustainable technology might be is complicated by the diverse variety of resources involved, which can lead to ‘apples to oranges’ comparisons.  

According to the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, green energy technologies like wind turbines and electric cars often do require many more mined minerals than the present fossil fuels infrastructure. 

One electric car, for example, requires six times more metallic and mineral materials than a combustion engine car, MIT’s university team reports. 

And a wind power plant requires nine times more of these mined compounds than a traditional gas-fired plant.

But these heavy investments in initial overhead are dwarfed by the repeated volume of fossil fuels currently mined today to meet present and growing energy demands. 

As of 2021, over 7.5 billion tons of coal were extracted from the ground, wreaking havoc on local people and environments from Sydney Australia’s Royal National Park, to coal-rich Inner Mongolia in China and more.

This is a whopping 25 times the current estimates of the metal mining needed for a clean energy revolution by 2040, according to projections from the Paris-based International Energy Agency (founded during the 1970s oil crisis by the OECD).

The transition, according to the IEA, will require new mining under 30 million tons.

Scott Odell, a visiting scientist at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative who specializes in clean energy and mining, cautions however that these environmental impacts often need to be assessed on a more detailed, case by case basis.

The mining of any two different metals requires different techniques with different impacts — as can two separate deposits of the same metal if located in significantly different conditions.  

‘I think if someone were to tell you one or the other is better in terms of direct impacts pound for pound,’ Odell said, ‘you should ask a lot of questions about how they got to that answer.’

Just a stone’s throw from picturesque hiking trails in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park lies Scotland’s only commercial gold mine.

The Cononish project was embraced by the local community and championed by politicians – as well as investors who bought shares in its London-listed owner Scotgold Resources.

But hopes that for decades to come it could produce gold to be exported or crafted into fine jewellery have been thrown into question after Scotgold last week warned it could crash into administration.

The warning was not the only news to rock the mining industry last week.

Councillors turned down a proposal to extend operations at Wales’ last opencast coal mine, Glan Lash in Carmarthenshire. And, separately, a slew of major insurance firms ruled out providing cover to the controversial planned coal mine in West Cumbria.

From these headlines, it may look as though the sector is in crisis.

So what has gone wrong – and is it still worth having a UK mining industry at all?

Mining in the British Isles has a rich heritage and dates back to the Bronze Age more than 4,000 years ago.

Later, Romans flocked here for lead and copper.

In the South West, Devon and Cornwall had some of the richest copper and tin reserves on Earth during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Cornish industry was memorialised by the author Winston Graham in his Poldark novels, which he began writing in the 1940s.

The books followed Ross Poldark, whose family made its fortune at fictional local copper mines, in the late 18th and early 19th century. The novels were adapted into a hugely successful TV series starring Aidan Turner.

When most ordinary people think of mining in the UK, however, they think of coalfields across the country that were a driving force in the industrial revolution.

Coal production peaked in the 1980s. But the mining sector is now trying to re-invent itself as a driving force in the green industrial revolution. 

It has also become, at least in the eyes of some politicians, a security issue in much the same way that energy did when Russia invaded Ukraine and sent gas prices soaring.

A focus now is on securing access to so-called ‘critical’ minerals.

The Department for Business and Trade describes a critical minerals strategy published last year as improving ‘the resilience of our vital supply chains’, safeguarding industry, increasing confidence in the UK’s energy transition and protecting national security. 

A series of mined metals including lithium and tin are seen as crucial to Britain’s efforts to go green and could also provide raw materials for local manufacturing of items such as car batteries.

‘Most people in the UK have grown a conscience over their food, but no one has a conscience about their metals currently,’ says James McFarlane, general manager at consultancy Mining Plus.

‘People understand blood diamonds but it’s not just how they’re mined from a human rights perspective but from an environmental perspective too.’

Last month the UK Infrastructure Bank invested £24 million in private company Cornish Lithium to help extract the battery metal.

John Meyer, head of research at SP Angel, added that although major institutional investors are less likely to back small British mining companies, they have been ‘replaced by a new breed of fast-growing and more expert managers’. 

These include Sir Mick Davis, the former Xstrata boss whose Vision Blue fund has invested in another group named  Cornish Metals, while another investor, called Techmet, run by Brian Menell, backs Cornish Lithium.

Jeremy Wrathall, founder of Cornish Lithium, added: ‘In Cornwall, the industry is booming. We are developing a repository of the essential metals that are needed for the energy transition.

‘The key thing here is the security of supply as well as the creation of new jobs and building pride in Cornwall. Mining gives the UK a significant addition to the value of its economy – every tonne which is mined is a tonne that is not imported, every job we create is a job that is not exported.’

Britain’s geology, McFarlane explains, is not the problem: ‘We’ve got great rocks and a lot of them.’ In his view, the biggest hurdle now is scaling the many small ventures that often struggle to raise the huge funds needed to get a project up and running.

Investors in Sirius Minerals remember this all too well.

The company, which at its peak had around 85,000 individual investors, almost went bust as it tried to build a sprawling fertiliser mine under the North York Moors National Park.

Sirius was bailed out by mining giant Anglo American, which has renamed it the Woodsmith Project.

Natural potash fertiliser is another critical material that will be needed to grow food for the world’s growing population.

For all the variety of mining in the UK, it seems as though it is projects that focus on the future, rather than just harking back to the past, that will continue to attract the most support.

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Reports of ‘seven-foot-tall aliens‘ terrorizing villagers in Peru stunned the world this week, with local leaders describing the ‘armored’ and ‘floating’ menaces as impervious to bullets.

The locals also compared their attackers to ‘green goblins’ and local Peruvian superstitions about ‘los Pelacaras,’ (‘the Face Peelers’) ― but now Peruvian law enforcement has offered a new suspect.

Illegal gold-mining crime syndicates, they said, are to blame: branches of the storied drug cartels like Brazil‘s ‘O Primeiro Comando da Capital,’ Colombia’s ‘Clan del Golfo,’ FARC, and others who have ravaged Latin America for decades.

Peru’s National Prosecutor’s Office, which is now investigating the ‘alien attacks,’ has pointed the finger at these gold ‘mafias,’ who have been partially ejected from Brazil and Colombia by their militaries.

Now in Peru, these jetpack-flying gold cartels hope to inspire fear with their bizarre campaign of ‘alien’ terror, according to prosecutors, keeping the locals in their homes and away from the cartels’ illegal gold pits.

Prosecutors suspect that these illegal mining cartels first used their jetpacks to prospect for gold deeper into the unforgiving jungles surrounding Peru’s Nanay river.

Members of Peru’s small Ikitu population are surrounded by dense jungle in rural Alto Nanay, where gold has deposited itself like silt into the riverbeds along the Nanay river tributaries that flow into the Amazon. 

The Ikitu told reporters that this summer’s ‘alien’ siege began on July 11, with locals facing vicious attacks by flying, 7-foot-tall mysterious beings in dark-colored hoods ever since.

‘These gentlemen are aliens,’ one Ikitu leader, Jairo Reátegui Ávila, told the local broadcaster Radio Programas del Perú (RPP).

‘I have shot him twice and he does not fall, but rises and disappears,’ Reátegui Ávila confessed to the local radio broadcaster. ‘We are frightened by what is happening in the community,’

But another key witness for prosecutors, a school teacher, reported seeing these eerie beings rise off the ground via much more terrestrial means. 

The illegal mining cartel was using propellers and high-tech equipment, according to this teacher, Cristian Caleb Pacaya, and other prosecution witnesses. Peruvian law enforcement have described the devices as ‘jetpacks.’ 

‘They would be using state-of-the-art technology, such as thrusters that allow people to fly,’ Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the Peruvian government’s prosecutor investigating the case, told RPP

Pacaya, who works in the nearby San Antonio de Pintuyacu community, told news outlet RPP Noticias that he witnessed the illegal miners attempt to kidnap a 15-year-old girl on July 29.

The teenager reportedly sustained cuts to her neck and other injuries during the attempted kidnapping and is now being treated locally.

Quintanilla, Loreto’s Specialized Prosecutor for Environmental Matters, told RPP that these ‘mafias de extranjeros’ or foreign mafias operate their gold extraction enterprise out of towns in Loreto, the northmost region of Peru.

Quintanilla said that 80 percent of these illegal gold mining operations are located in the Nanay river basin, a territory northwest of Loreto’s capitol and home to the Ikitu.

As Loreto’s environmental crime watchdog, Quintanilla told the outlet that he suspects these illegal gold miners may have first used the jetpacks to explore deeper into the dense Peruvian jungle for promising new riverbed gold deposits.

‘We have investigated that these gentlemen would be using this suit to reach those places,’ he said.

By this theory, the gold cartels’ use of the jetpacks to stage their violent, otherworldly attacks would have been something of an afterthought.

The Ikitu have begged the Peruvian military to intervene amid the past month of extraordinary, ‘Scooby Doo’-esque attacks on their home in Alto Nanay.  

Locals had initially described the attackers as silver-colored beings with enormous heads, who were impervious to the tribe’s hunting weapons.  

‘They seem armored like the green goblin from Spider-Man,’ Ikitu leader Ávila said. 

Ávila went on to describe the attackers shoes as ’round in shape.’

‘With that they rise up,’ he explained. ‘They float one meter high and have a red light on the heel.’ 

‘His head is long, his mask is long, and his eyes are half yellowish. With that they see you well and they leave,’ according to Ávila’s statements, as quoted by RPP. 

‘They are experts at escaping,’ he said. 

Unable to carry on with their daily lives in the village, which is approximately 10 hours by river from Loreto’s capital Iquitos, the Ikitu have now organized night patrols to hunt down their high-tech attackers until Peru’s military can intervene.

Besides the ‘7-foot-tall extraterrestrial attackers’ theory, some locals referred to the groups as ‘los Pelacaras’ after the alleged organ traffickers known in the region, a winking reference to the face-peeling monsters of local legend. 

While gold-mining has been part of Peru’s economy for centuries, the practice of highly unregulated, so-called ‘artisanal mining’ in the region boomed during the 2008 global financial crisis, amid a long spike in gold prices.

‘In some countries,’ according to a 2016 assessment by the international law enforcement body INTERPOL, ‘the illicit trade in gold would be more profitable than drug trafficking and seen as low risk by criminals, likely due to the strong law enforcement response to drug trafficking in the region.’

As more and more investors have fled national currencies due to market instability or inflationary pressures, the value of gold has continued to entice organized crime into expanding these illegal mining operations. 

While quantifying the true value of this black- and grey-market gold has been difficult, the nonprofit Artisanal Gold Council (AGC) estimates that these activities make up about one fifth of total gold production worldwide.

‘Artisanal gold mining,’ as AGC describes it, is somewhere between a $30 billion and $40 billion industry all by itself.

Illegal, unregulated and ‘artisanal’ gold miners produced approximately 500 metric tons annually as of AGC’s 2023 estimates, steady growth from the roughly 330 metric tons that this nebulous gold mining underworld produced in 2011.

Peru is currently the largest gold producer in Latin America, unearthing about 150 metric tons of ‘artisanal gold’ every year, by AGC’s analysis.

The devastation and pollution caused by these gold cartel operations have become so expansive that their impact on the Peruvian jungle can be seen from space. 

On Christmas Eve 2020, one astronaut was able to photograph eastern Peru’s glittering gold prospecting pits while orbiting with the International Space Station. 

As later explained in a post by NASA’s Earth Observatory, these gold prospecting pits are comprised of hundreds of tightly packed water-filled basins, carved out of deforested and de-vegetated flats of mud.

Environmental regulators, local citizens and many others have expressed concern over how these illegal gold miners use mercury, and its no-less-toxic sister compound methylmercury, to separate gold ore from the surrounding soil.

Mercury, synonymous in Victorian times with ‘mad hatters,’ is a potent neurotoxin which can ravage local wildlife, plant life and people as it seeps into ponds, waterways and underground aquifers. 

Worse still, once that pure mercury is in the soil and the water, bacterial and microbial processes inevitably convert it into super-toxic methylmercury, allowing it to persist and furthering its damage.

From orbit, however, the illegal gold pits gleam in an otherworldly, ominous kind of beauty while reflecting the sun’s rays.

South of Loreto, in the region or ‘department’ of known as Madre de Dios, the Peruvian government declared a ‘state of emergency’ in 2019 ― deploying 1,500 police and soldiers to crack down on criminal gold mining. 

According to a 2022 USAID report, the Madre de Dios area alone had roughly 6,000 gold miners working with formal permission from the Peruvian government. 

But nearly six-times more, about 40,000 illegal gold miners, were also operating in Madre de Dios by USAID’s estimates.

So far in 2023, Quintanilla and his Environmental Prosecutor’s Office in Loreto report that they have managed to destroy 110 illegal gold dredges and 10 mining camps. 

This past weekend, Peruvian Navy fighters faced fire with illegal miners near the Pucaurco and Alvarenga communities, RPP reports, where they succeeded in destroying oil drums, a gold-pit water suction system, and other equipment used by the criminal gold miners.

But no jetpacks were reported as recovered from those weekend raids. 

Mining stocks pressed higher amid reports that China could unveil a major stimulus package to turbocharge its economy.

The Chinese government is considering new measures to prop up its faltering property market.

Actions could include cutting the down payment for a mortgage in some neighbourhoods, reducing agent commissions on deals, and relaxing restrictions for residential purchases, Bloomberg reported.

It comes as the world’s second-largest economy could provide further policy support as part of its post-pandemic recovery.

Such hopes lifted China-exposed stocks, with Anglo American adding 5.2 per cent, or 118.5p, to 2418p, while Antofagasta was up 5.5 per cent, or 76.5p, to 1459.5p, Glencore gained 4.1 per cent, or 17p, to 433.9p and Rio Tinto climbed by 3.8 per cent, or 184p, to 5070p.

There were also gains for Prudential, the insurer, which increased by 5.7 per cent, or 62p, to 1153p, while banking giant Standard Chartered rose 3.8 per cent, or 22.4p, to 664p.

The London stock market ended the week in positive territory, with the FTSE 100 up 1.6 per cent, or 117.01 points, to 7607.28, while the FTSE 250 climbed 1.7 per cent, or 321.55 points, to 19,149.31.

There was a double dose of major news across the Atlantic after the US debt ceiling deal passed through the Senate.

This paved the way for the government to suspend its self-imposed limit on borrowing until January 1, 2025, and avoid defaulting on its debt.

And the world’s largest economy surpassed forecasts by adding 339,000 jobs last month – way ahead of the 190,000 economists had expected.

Oil prices rose 2 per cent as Brent crude hit $76 a barrel. Oil producers at Opec and its allies are set to meet on Sunday.

In April, Opec announced plans to slash supply by nearly 1.2m barrels a day.

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, said that there was an ‘outside risk that oil ministers could surprise the markets with another production cut, given the recent weakness seen in prices’.

Aviva added 2.6 per cent, or 10.5p, to 409.1p after the insurer completed a £300m share buy-back programme.

The repurchase scheme, which began in March, saw the group buy nearly 73m shares at an average price of 412p a share.

Shareholders at Purplebricks overwhelmingly voted in favour for the embattled online estate agent to be snapped up by one of its rivals for £1.

At a general meeting, 91.15 per cent of participating investors backed the bid from Strike.

Shares in Purplebricks, which are expected to be cancelled from AIM on June 16, tumbled 17.1 per cent, or 0.09p, to 0.42p.

Revolution Beauty hailed the ‘important step’ that it had made towards lifting the suspension on its shares after the cosmetics group posted its delayed results for the six months to the end of August 2022.

It stopped trading in September last year after its auditor BDO identified ‘serious concerns’ over the annual accounts, causing it to miss its deadline for reporting the numbers and triggering the suspension of its shares. The company posted a loss of £13.4m in the six months to August 31, compared with a £28.9m loss the year before.

Pelatro, the marketing software company, won a recurring contract worth around £519,000 every year to provide its platform to a Middle East telecommunications group. Shares rose 19.2 per cent, or 1.25p, to 7.75p.