Word: gold
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DRUGSTORE COWBOY. Matt Dillon and friends go on a drug spree in Gus Van Sant's eye-catching tour of the lower depths. Dillon, a punk Montgomery Clift, is pure Acapulco gold as a smart addict who gets scared straight...
...motive for these mountainous excavations: gold. In 1961 Livermore, then working for the Newmont Mining Corp., made a seminal discovery. He looked for gold in the "windows" of a geological feature known as the Carlin Trend. Windows occur where obscuring layers of rock, displaced by an uplift, have eroded to expose the rock below. When Livermore cut into a window on the Carlin Trend, he hit what nongeologists took to calling invisible gold...
Millions of years ago, hot springs laden with flecks of gold boiled up through deep fractures in the earth's crust. But the golden residue did not accumulate in rich veins. Instead, in geologists' lingo, it "disseminated" throughout the siltstone and limestone laid down by an ancient ocean. Small wonder, then, that old-time prospectors overlooked it. "This gold," marvels Livermore, "is so fine you just can't pan it. You can't even see it under an ordinary microscope...
...extract gold from such low-grade deposits, miners must crush tons and tons of rock, which is piled into mammoth heaps and irrigated with cyanide. The cyanide percolates through the heap, extracting the gold. In the early days of the invisible-gold rush, a ton of ore might contain a few tenths of an ounce of gold. Today that minuscule amount would be considered high grade. Says Livermore: "They're mining deposits that we would have considered waste rock back in 1961." Nevada mines are now digging up a ton of rock to get back as little...
About a dozen large open-pit gold mines using such techniques are now strung out along the Carlin Trend. The Dee. Maggie Creek. Gold Quarry. Goldstrike. Blue Star. The Rain. The Bootstrap. American Barrick Resources Corp., a Canadian company, recently announced plans to excavate a billion tons of rock to get at 12 million oz. of gold -- worth about $4.4 billion at current prices. In the process, the mine will bequeath to posterity a hole 1,500 ft. deep, 4,000 ft. wide and 7,000 ft. long...