YELLOWKNIFE, Northwest Territories—This small subarctic city has a big problem. There are 237,000 metric tons of arsenic trioxide locked in the subterranean caverns of Giant Mine on the edge of Yellowknife, an unwanted byproduct from what was once one of the largest gold mines in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Consider that it only takes 140 milligrams of arsenic trioxide to kill a person; there’s enough of the poison here to kill 1.7 trillion people.
The local indigenous people refer to the arsenic as a sleeping monster. Company and government officials hoped the arsenic would remain frozen underground forever. But mining operations and climate change caused the permafrost to melt, raising fears in the city of 20,000 people that toxic material could mix with the runoff and slither into the nearby waters of Great Slave Lake, the world’s 10th-largest freshwater body.
From there, it could snake 1,000 miles along the Mackenzie River to the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean, poisoning the wildlife, the land and the water along its path. Giant Mine is a warning for governments and companies that want to mine the riches of the North, say environmentalists and local activists. President Trump’s musings about acquiring Greenland and annexing Canada have renewed focus on the raw materials buried under the melting permafrost.
For the rest of this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/deep-in-an-abandoned-gold-mine-a-toxic-legacy-lurks/ar-AA1E7zLB