Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [76]
Josh and Oscar and I passed a quiet afternoon touring the mine. Oscar took us to the “pit,” a half-mile-wide terraced gash in the earth layered with red and white-streaked rocks. At the bottom, two massive dump trucks with fifteen-foot-tall tires waited for full loads of stone. In a few hours, Oscar said, they’d take several more trucks down, and each truck would haul one thousand tons of rock up to the masher. Swinging his arm around, he showed us the pulverizing machines, where men in reflective jumpsuits and respirators—looking like the kind of action-movie extras who die in scores at the point of James Bond’s stolen machine gun—monitored a series of conveyor belts. (Oscar, following this metaphor, would be the muscle-bound villain who gives Bond several tense moments over the crusher.) The rock entered three separate crushers until it had been mashed into pebbles three-eighths of an inch wide, then traveled along on another series of conveyor belts that dropped all of the pebbles into “the pile,” a mile-wide mound of crushed rock. Sprinklers sprayed the pile with cyanide solution, keeping the rock black and glistening in the sun. A gentle mist blew off the sprinklers and toward our viewpoint, but Oscar seemed unconcerned. He even took us up to a sector at the top of the pile where the sprinklers weren’t running for a better viewpoint. “Truck ascending the pile,” he called into his radio. “Repeat, truck ascending the pile.” It sounded very cool. A few minutes later we stood, surrounded by glittering black rock, eyeing the sprinkler hoses and looking down across the entire mine.
Oscar pointed out the second pit. “They’ll start laying the explosives after lunch,” he said. “Will you be here for four hours more? You can wait in the office.”
Josh and I exchanged a look, but this attempt at non-verbal communication failed because we were both still wearing our reflective safety sunglasses. But neither of us wanted to sit at someone’s cubicle for four more hours. We’d already had a fascinating day, and I now understood Darwin’s interest in touring the mines of Chile: There’s pleasure in seeing how things worked. By the day’s end, Josh was explaining its geological aspects to me in minute detail. (Excerpt from his journal from that day: “At a modern open-pit mine, cores are drilled from the earth every four meters in a grid pattern and sent off to geologists for analysis. The hole each core sample is pulled from is assigned a GPS address, and scientists come back with descriptions of the rock type and density at all different depths for each of the holes . . .”)
Even in the 1800s, mining incorporated a tremendous amount of knowledge. Human capital lay behind every advance, from the discovery of veins to the leaching of minerals. “The washing when described sounds a very simple process,” Darwin wrote after seeing Nixon’s gold mine, “but it is at the same time beautiful to see how the exact adaptation of the current of water to the specific gravity of the gold so easily separates the powdered matrix from the metal.” Not his punchiest quote ever, but it precisely conveys the fascination. It’s something akin to awe-inspiring, to get outside your own field and see other humans thinking cleverly and designing such complicated, useful machines. Walking back through the office, past desk-bound engineers analyzing rock data, I felt the same way: deeply impressed at the centuries of accumulated wisdom that allowed geologists with GPS and computers to pinpoint specific metals in the ground, remove specific chunks of rock with precise explosives, and then use a chemical cocktail to turn the rock into gold bars—all in a facility straight from the Bond set. Regardless of the environmental and economic politics of the mine’s investors, its nuts-and-bolts