the lack of investment in new mines and expansions in the recent past, coupled with the current capital raising difficulties being experienced by the mining industry, are paving the way for severe shortages, and much higher prices, ahead. Even if all current major planned and proposed projects come on stream, and that is a very big if, at current projected growth rates it is possible the industry could move to a small surplus in 10 years time. But with the new developments, as noted above, often in areas of far higher risk there remains the likelihood that the supply/demand situation will remain tight leading to a robust price scenario for much of the foreseeable future.In the near term, the industry is uncertain about the rate of the U.S. economic recovery and there are concerns whether some of the Chinese demand for copper and other metals is driven by speculators. Freeport McMoRan earlier this week said it is premature for them to re-open all the mines shut down or return operating mines to full production, given so many unknowns in the marketplace.
The DNR Flickr feed (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wastatednr/4009679251/) has more photos of the Nile Landslide west of Naches. They were taken by DNR geologists who are working with WSDOT to examine the massive slide that damaged several homes and closed Highway 410. Meanwhile, CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/13/washington.landslide/index.html?iref=newssearch) is running online updates with new video, photos and a map. Closer to home there is video from King 5 News (http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_101309WAB-SR410-landslide-KS.21246b864.html?rss) and from Yakima’s KAPP-35 (http://www.kapptv.com/news/?sect_rank=1§ion_id=1&story_id=17241) and KNDO 23 (via MSNBC - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33284512/ns/local_news-yakima_wa/). The Olympian (http://www.theolympian.com/southsound/story/1001431.html) reprinted a Seattle Times article about the Governor’s declaration of a state of emergency for the area, while the Times (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010057844_weblandslidenothingnew13.html) ran a story by The Yakima Herald-Republic (http://www.yakima-herald.com/galleries/3309/photos/1) about the impact on homeowners. Stay up to date on what portions of Highway 410 are still open by checking the WSDOT website (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2009/10/23-WSDOT+begins+building+SR+410+detour.htm) or signing up for the agency’s e-mail updates (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2009/10/410telephonehotlineandclosureinfo.htm).Source: http://washingtondnr.wordpress.com/
New photos show scale of Naches landslide (http://washingtondnr.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/new-photos-show-scale-of-naches-landslide/)
Quick Report (http://slidingthought.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/quick-report/)
Cyprus Tohono Corporation, a former Phelps Dodge subsidiary, has agreed to fund an estimated $6 million groundwater investigation at the Cyprus Tohono Mine Site, a copper mine southwest of Casa Grande, Ariz.Freeport McMoRan issued a fact sheet in July this year about their reclamation efforts at the mine, including groundwater impacts.
The agreement requires Cyprus to thoroughly investigate the groundwater and pay future oversight costs incurred by the EPA.
'This investigation of uranium-contaminated groundwater will guide the EPA in selecting and designing a cleanup remedy that is effective at protecting human health and the environment,' said Keith Takata, the EPA's Superfund director for the Pacific Southwest region.
Currently, Cyprus, in consultation with the Tohono O'odham Nation and the EPA, is voluntarily investigating uranium-contaminated groundwater at the site. The EPA, Tohono O'odham and Cyprus will meet with Cypus to formalize the groundwater investigation on October 20.
Under EPA oversight, Cypress recently completed a $49 million cleanup, where approximately 4.4 million cubic yards of mine waste of all affected areas was placed into a lined repository with soil cover and revegetation. Seeding and vegetation growth monitoring will continue over the next three years.
The 10,505-acre copper mine is located 32 miles south of Casa Grande on the Tohono O'odham Nation near North Komelik. Mining operations on the property have occurred sporadically since the 1880s, but large-scale open-pit mining of copper oxide ore began in the 1950s, and underground mining began in 1970.Follow the U.S. EPA's Pacific Southwest region on
Twitter: http://twitter.com/EPAregion9
and join the LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/1823773/
Contact Information: Margot Perez-Sullivan, 415.947.4149 Perezsullivan.margot@epa.gov
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack withdrew a letter he sent ten days ago, and now says the US Forest Service will include the 'no action' option in the EIS process, something that he had written previously would violate existing laws. His change of opinion comes just in advance of two public meetings this weekend in the area organized by Reps Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords. The Daily Star has run prominent stories about Rosemont almost every day the past week, so large turnouts are expected.
On Saturday, October 24, 2009, U.S. Deputy Under-Secretary of Agriculture, Jay Jensen will be visiting southeastern Arizona on a fact-finding trip to learn more about the proposed Rosemont Copper project and its impact on the local community. Mr. Jensen’s visit was requested by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Congressman Raul Grijalva, who hope to persuade the Forest Service to use a “No Action Alternative” to halt development of this important project.The times and locations of these meetings are :
#1. $325,000 to study seismic activity in Memphis, TNSen. McCain doesn't state what the study covers or who the earmark goes to but the geologists who told me about it today at the Geological Society of America meeting were not happy.
This volume describes an iconoclastic model for the Cretaceous–Tertiary development of the Cordilleran orogen. Hildebrand argues that the orogeny was collisional in origin, caused by westerly-dipping subduction beneath an exotic ribbon continent named Rubia, and followed by development of an eastward-dipping subduction zone outboard of the collision zone. This model explains the origin of Laramide thick-skinned deformation, Cordilleran-type batholiths, early Tertiary metamorphic core complexes, Basin and Range extension, porphyry copper deposits, and the Pelona-Orocopia-Rand schists, and it helps resolve the longstanding Baja–British Columbia controversy.Bob's very good-natured about the controversy this publication has already generated in the tectonics community. This is just the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that produces wonderful debates and helps resolve long-standing problems in the field.
alifornia, I jumped at the chance.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, but did we really expect someone to release an application for iPhones to view the geology of the Grand Canyon State??
he palm of your hand, for only $4.99.
The bridge over the Colorado River, immediately below Hoover Dam is making great strides. I've received multiple sets of spectacular photos but without anyone sure where they came from, so I can't attribute them.Creeping closer inch by inch 900ft above the Colorado River the two sides of a $250 million bridge at the Hoover Dam is slowly taking shape.
The bridge will carry a new section of US Route 93 past the bottleneck of the old road which can be seen twisting and winding around and across the dam itself.
When complete, it will provide a new link between the states of Nevada and Arizona. In an incredible feat of engineering, the road will be supported on the two massive concrete arches which jut out of the rock face.
The arches are made up of 53 individual sections each 24ft long which have been cast on-site and are being lifted into place using an improvised high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons.
The arches will eventually measure more than 1,000ft across. At the moment, the structure looks like a traditional suspension bridge. But once the arches are complete, the suspending cables on each side will be removed.
Extra vertical columns will then be installed on the arches to carry the road. The bridge has become known as the Hoover Dam bypass, although it is officially called the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial bridge, after a former governor of Nevada and an American Football player from Arizona who joined the US Army and was killed in Afghanistan.
Work on the bridge started in 2005 and should finish next year. An estimated 17,000 cars and trucks will cross it every day.
A moderate 3.9 magnitude earthquake on Friday afternoon was felt by residents of northwest Arizona and the Boulder City area of Nevada (19 miles away). Statement
Of
Marcia K. McNutt
As nominee for the position of
Director of the U.S. Geological Survey
Before the
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Of the
United States Senate
October 8, 2009
Chairman Bingaman, Senator Murkowski, distinguished members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I am honored to come before you as President Obama’s nominee for Director of the US Geological Survey. I am excited about this opportunity to join Secretary Salazar’s team at the Department of the Interior, especially now, when the nation’s need for timely information on natural hazards, environmental and climate change, and water, energy, biological, and other natural resources has never been greater.
My inspiration for dedicating my life to the Earth sciences comes from having lived in some of the most beautiful landscapes that America has to offer: the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the sandy beaches of La Jolla and Cape Cod, and now John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven above Monterey Bay. I always knew I wanted to be a scientist, but even when I was young I could never picture myself in a lab coat with a test tube.
I majored in Physics at Colorado College, but my favorite college course was Introduction to Geology, taught by Professor John Lewis. Colorado College uses the block plan in which students only take one course at a time for a month. Introduction to Geology is two blocks long. So my first two months at college were spent with Doc Lewis and about 19 other students scrambling around the Front Range with our back packs and sleeping bags trying to piece together the geologic history of the Southern Rockies from first principles. We never cracked a book the entire time. I was drawn to the grandeur of the Earth sciences and awed by the time and space scales upon which Earth processes played out. No lab coat. No test tube. Science outside!
Once I arrived at graduate school at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I switched fields from Physical Oceanography to Marine Geophysics because plate tectonics was revolutionizing the geosciences. With the vast majority of plate boundaries under the ocean, marine geophysicists would be the ones to put the pieces of the theory together. Entering the field at that time was like becoming a biologist right after Darwin wrote Origin of the Species or becoming a physicist right after Einstein wrote the Special Theory of Relativity. Old papers, textbooks, and theories were suddenly rendered irrelevant, such that there was no large body of prior knowledge to be absorbed. Observations had to be reinterpreted within the context of the new framework. Major marine expeditions were led, and often staffed entirely, by my fellow graduate students and myself, because many of the more senior practitioners in the field were too slow to embrace the new paradigm. It was a heady time filled with the excitement of scientific discovery. Science at sea!
I credit the US Geological Survey for giving me my first “real” job after receiving my PhD. I spent three wonderful years in the Office of Earthquake Studies in Menlo Park, California, calibrating the strength of plates on time scales relevant to the earthquake generation process. Working on the earthquake problem, in California, gave me my first taste of what it was like to be involved in research of interest to the general public, not just my fellow scientists. This was science people use! I also benefitted from this time at the GS in that I can still appreciate the culture of the organization from the viewpoint of someone who has spent time “down in the trenches,” and yet the intervening years away allow me to bring a fresh perspective to the organization.
The majority of my career has been spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I served on the faculty in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences for 15 years, and was eventually awarded an endowed chair. I enjoyed being surrounded every day by some of the brightest young minds in the country, engaging them in forefront research problems, and watching them grow intellectually each day. My favorite part about MIT was serving as a freshman advisor and hearing the personal stories of the students each September. Many represented the first generation in their families to attend college. Whether they had come from the barrios of San Antonio or the plains of North Dakota, the one thing they shared was the fact that they had earned their place in the MIT freshman class by their own effort. And back home, an entire community was cheering them on.
My research took me and my students all over the planet: to the islands of French Polynesia, the Tibet Plateau, Iceland, Siberia, and Antarctica. At MIT I learned how to do what really counts, how to find, measure, and nurture excellence, and to become ridiculously efficient at multi-tasking. Equally importantly, I developed a complete intolerance for sloppy science and anything but the highest ethical standards.
My most recent posting for the last 12 years has been as the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, better known as MBARI. MBARI is an oceanographic research institution founded by David Packard and privately funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With its emphasis on peer relationships between scientists and engineers and encouragement of high-risk research and technology development, MBARI is best described as a “NASA for the oceans,” albeit at a smaller budget scale. This latest position has given me ample experience in leadership, management, and administration, as well as considerable opportunity to familiarize myself with issues and opportunities in environmental chemistry and biology.
In looking back at my time at MBARI, I believe I have left a mark on several aspects of institute operations. First, teamwork. Across science, engineering, marine operations, outreach programs, and administrative areas, everyone functions as a well-oiled team. To a person, everyone understands that the reason we exist is to support the research mission and to make it progress smoothly and flawlessly. Second, our mission. I helped redirect MBARI from a broadly constituted portfolio in basic research to a more targeted set of socially relevant topics such as ocean acidification, eutrophication, methane hydrates, and harmful algal blooms, nearly a decade before they became common buzzwords. Finally, the staff. I am proud of the people I have hired, their work ethic, and their commitment to Packard’s founding vision of how a different kind of institution can truly make a difference.
You may all be wondering why I would consider leaving such a scientific paradise and relocating from my beloved Pastures of Heaven at this time. This nation is facing important decisions concerning future uses of its precious resources: water, energy, and environment. We are increasingly at economic risk from natural hazards. The challenges associated with climate change must be better understood. Submarine areas under US control out to the 200 mile limit are equal to the subaerial land area of this great nation, and yet the seabed resources have yet to be explored and inventoried. In deciding how best to move forward, our leaders, including members of Congress, the President, and the Secretary of the Interior, need sound, unbiased, scientific advice. Science is not the only factor in decision making, but it needs to be one of the factors. The USGS has long-term records and scientific expertise that can be used for making good choices based on solid data, and can look into the geologic record to determine whether recent conditions are likely to be representative of the future. Now, more than ever before, the nation needs the USGS, and I would be proud, if confirmed, to lead this effort.
So, in summary, these are the skills and qualities I would hope to bring to the leadership of the US Geological Survey, if confirmed:
- The capacity to be inspired by the natural world
- A love for science outside
- An appreciation for the culture of the US Geological Survey
- A history of association with some of the finest research institutions in the nation
- The ability to recognize and nurture excellence
- High ethical standards
- An aptitude for leadership
- Experience in team building
- A track record for asking the right scientific questions
Thank you for the opportunity to come before you, and I look forward to this challenge, should you confirm me for this position.
