Monthly Archives: July 2008

As the manuscript-delivery deadline approaches for our Damn Interesting book, we must take drastic action to avoid being sucked into a temporal vortex of magnificent and frightful proportions. Consequently, we hope you won’t mind a handful of re-runs while we enter phase three of the book-writing process: Irrational Bargaining.

We’ll try to keep you abreast of our progress as we segue into Guilt, absquatulate into Anger, and deviate into Depression. We anticipate arriving at the final phase– Acceptance– vibrating with caffeine and emotional compression.

On an unrelated note, our site’s new-and-improved platform is nearing completion, and in about 8 weeks we hope to begin private Beta testing. We’ll need people to help us do some load testing (lots of people at the same time) as well as compatibility testing (making sure the new site works everywhere, including weird mobile browsers and stuff). If you are willing to help us test when that time comes, please follow this link.

Superthanks!

Sign up for Beta Testing

Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn’t always been so – it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was in charge of virtually all the mining operations. When running underground mines became too costly in the 1950’s, Anaconda switched to the drastic but effective methods of “mountaintop removal” and open pit mining. Huge amounts of copper were needed to satisfy the growing demand for radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles, computers, and all the other equipment of America’s post-war boom. As more and more rock was excavated, groundwater began to seep into the pit, and pumps had to be installed to keep it from slowly flooding.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

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