Mining

Waste Rock and Tailings

When a mining company wants to dig up specific minerals, it has to remove rock from the earth to do so. Any rock removed that does not contain economic amounts of the wanted mineral is called waste rock. Mining companies put this waste rock in piles called “dumps.”

The first global review of their status has found that populations are declining almost everywhere they live, from Alaska and Canada, to Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia.

The iconic deer is vital to indigenous peoples around the circumpolar north.

Yet it is increasingly difficult for the deer to survive in a world warmed by climate change and altered by industrial development, say scientists.

Reindeer and caribou belong to the same species, Rangifer tarandus.

Caribou live in Canada, Alaska and Greenland; while reindeer live in Russia, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Environment Canada assembled some of the world's top woodland-caribou scientists for advice on the habitat needed to save the threatened animals, and then it rejected their suggestions.

The scientists' conclusions, released in a report last week, say that development should be tightly controlled in about half the northern boreal forest, to give caribou a better shot at long-term survival. The report also estimated that 30 of Canada's 57 woodland-caribou populations have shrunk to such low levels they are probably no longer self-sustaining.