So I have quick rant if this does not follow forum guidelines please delete.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ater?CMP=fb_us

So recently up here in the great white north we have finally began to get snow. It so happened that some geese were migrating during this time and got stuck in the snow storm while in Butte with the only "safe" place to land was the Berkley Pit. For those of you who do not know the Pit is a huge open pit mine that at one time produced a ton of copper ore as well as some other minerals. With most mines being the same age as this one it eventually became unprofitable to continue mining consistently. After mining slowed down the pit began to fill up with water (a lot of water now the largest body of contaminated water in the world 4 trillion gallons if I remember off hand). The report on all of these geese dying is very tragic and not good thing in the slightest but birds fly into the water and die all the time. They see the water think its safe to land only to find out its 2.5pH (very acidic about the equivalent of sulfuric acid in car batteries) and end up dying. This has obviously been a problem for the mine for a very long time. The Mine, Montana and Tech have all been working together to try and think of a solution on how to fix this problem but run into the problem of there is a lot of water in there with no where to go unless they are able to filter all of the heavy metals out of it. Now my rant about this is seeing how everyone who commented about this on Facebook and other places was blaming the geese dying on the Mine and the Montana gov't. While having all the water in there is the mines fault to some degree they have been in my opinion they have acted responsibly and not tried to reallocate the water to somewhere that would harm more wildlife, environment or people. I guess what I am trying to get at is please do not have your first thought to be to blame the Mine and Government because all of them have been trying to fix this problem for a long time and have yet to find a successful solution to the problem.

One thing my Chem professor told me which I think is pretty neat is that there is still a lot of copper in mine so what they will do is take a big sheet of iron and set it in a separate area and then take water from the mine and fill the area with the water after a certain amount of time the iron and copper atoms will switch and they will end up with a big sheet of copper (not pure but close). I think that is one solution or they find something similar to help with this problem instead of pointing fingers.

If you are interested in reading more here is a pretty good website.
http://www.pitwatch.org/