Plum-bummin’ in Leadville

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After an insane week in the lab a road trip to the cool meadows of the nearby mountain range was just what the doctor called for. It was the last weekend before the family- one teacher and one kid- return to school. Summer break 2009 is history.

We piled in the car and pointed it uphill towards Leadville, Colorado. The planetary atmosphere thinly blankets this insanely high mountain city. It was just what I needed to clear my scrambled mind. Nothing like blinding sunshine and mild oxygen starvation to reset a brain in chronic spasm from sensory overload.

Leadville sits at 10,152 feet above sea level. If you doubt the effect on your stamina, just take a short sprint in any direction. Or just plod up the stairs of your hotel. Lordy. All of those business dinners- all that lovely Cabernet and creme brulee- and years of driving a desk have caught up with me.

Leadville is located in the Colorado mineral belt and began to populate with fortune seakers about the time of the Colorado gold rush in 1859. Some placer gold was found in the streams, particularly in what was then called California Gulch, but for the most part Leadville became a silver camp.

In 1874, two investors with metallurgical training, Alvinius B. Woods and William H. Stevens arrived in Leadville and analyzed the muds found in the local sluicing operations. According to A Companion to the American West, edited by William Francis Deverell, (2004, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-21357-0, p. 319) Woods and Stevens found the heavy black mud so problematic for gold sluicing was in fact composed of lead carbonate with high levels of silver. Woods and Stevens invested $50,000, quietly buying as many claims as they could and began hydraulic mining operations immediately.

By 1890 there were nearly 90 mines in operation employing 6000 miners. At its peak there were 14 smelter operations supporting the mines. Leadville was a genuine boom town with the expected mix of characters.

A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing at the top.

All mining towns have characters who go on to dominate local legends and stories. Among the well-known-for-being-famous rags to riches to rags players in Leadville are Horace and Agusta Tabor, along with Horace’s mistress and 2nd wife, Elizabeth “Baby Doe”.

To make a long story short, Horace was a struggling shop keeper who invested in a mine east of Leadville. Though it was salted by the previous owner to entice buyers, Tabor dug 25 ft further down the shaft and struck a rich and extensive vein of silver ore. The operation was called the Matchless Mine, after Tabor’s favorite brand of chewing tobacco.

According to the tour operators, Tabor operated the Matchless Mine 24/7 for 13 years, pulling an average of $2000/day of silver out of it. At its peak, the mine is said to have employed 100 people. Miners were paid the common rate of $3.00 per day to climb 365 ft to the bottom of the shaft for 12 hour shifts.

Matchless Mine Surface Workings

Tailings Dump Detail

The underground workings of the mine followed the vein structure and focused on sending concentrated ore to the surface. Buckets carrying approximately one ton of ore per load (my estimate) were tipped into ore carts and rolled into the ore house for hand sorting. The most highly concentrated and valuable ore was dumped down a chute for loading into a rail car and the gangue (or tailings) was dumped into the gulch.

An assay building (not shown) was on site to provide a continuous assay and accounting of silver sent to the smelter in Pueblo, Colorado. Unlike many other mine operators, Tabor owned a rail operation and had a spur at the mine for pickup and delivery of ore. Many mine operators had to employ mule-skinners to cart wagon loads of ore to a rail siding for transport to the nearest smelter.

In 1893 the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the collapse of the railroad industry bubble were part of a panic that lead to a crash in silver prices. Tabor lost everything and, as a respected public figure, was appointed postmaster of Denver for a short time. Eventually Tabor died at age 69 in 1899. Ex-wife Agusta had invested her divorce settlement wisely in Denver and lived comfortably. Widow Baby Doe Tabor was found frozen stiff in her shack at the Matchless Mine in 1935.

Matchless Mine Shack

All of the digging from the boom time of Leadville has left an enduring legacy for those who live in the watershed. Much of the mining activity occurred uphill, east of the city and as a result, that area is pock marked with many large colorful tailings heaps. While the colors are interesting to ponder and sample, the ground and surface waters are greatly affected by aqueous extraction of metals from these piles.

If you stand next to one of these heaps, you can’t help but notice the smell of sulfur. The ore and tailings are enriched in sulfides and once exposed to air and water, oxidation occurs to make corrosive runoff. This is a kind of heap leaching phenomenon that will eventually exhaust itself, but only at the cost of water quality.

Flocking Algorithms

S.O.L.

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I’ve been too busy inserting Mg into R-X bonds to pay attention to the www. The DSC is on the fritz and the ethernet is playing games with my TGA. I need to run an FTNMR and a GCMS of my cpd ASAP. Luckily the HPLC is still spewing out results. I treated my headache with NSAID’s but my ADD is flaring up. The Jeep is in the shop, DOA, and I’m PO’d. I need to gin up a procedure for the ARC and RC-1 tests. And, worst of all, I’m out of concentrated givashit. SSDD.

So there.

Mantle of Insanity

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Recently I went to a local outfitter of camping gear to look for Coleman Lantern Mantles. As I was scanning the shelves a cherubic faced clerk came up to me and asked if I needed help. I said I was looking for lantern mantles.

When we arrived to the endcap where they were hanging, I asked him if they were still making radioactive mantles. He looked at me as though I were a bit of a loon. When I pressed the question, he balked and summoned his manager.

The manager, another youngster who was much more of an alpha male, scoffed at my question and tried to assure me that such a thing was absurd. Why in the world would mantles be radioactive? I tried to assure the youngster that, yes indeed, mantles were radioactive at one time because they contained thorium. At this point the manager was becoming visibly annoyed at his time lost addressing the questions of an obvious crackpot.

I recognized the patronizing tone he took and turned and left the store. As a child of cold war science, I have witnessed mantles sitting in a cloud chamber with ionized cloud streamers zipping every whichway from the innocent looking woven bag. Today, schools are terrified of chemicals and radiation science. Mr Manager missed out on a real experience by being born into the post-cold war world of bland science education.

So, my GM counter sits in my office clicking from the occasional background radiation piercing the GM tube. Eventually I’ll find a source to give it something more interesting to detect.

Rhodium Coins Now Available

Gaussling’s 12th Epistle to the Bohemians. Elements Rock.

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Some acquaintances have asked about my new interest in geology. What’s the deal with rocks and mining?

What interests me is not so much the economic value and extravagant production of certain minerals and precious metals. What is of interest is the question of how it came about that there is such a thing as an ore body. An ore body is a geological formation which is defined by a localized concentration of certain substances. How does it happen that chemical elements can become concentrated from a more distributed condition?

Celebrity astronomers are often seen on cable channels pedantically nattering on about “Star Stuff”. OK, Dr. Skippy, what is star stuff and what does it do? What are the particulars about the local star stuff, ie., the earth? This is the realm of cosmochemistry and geochemistry- elective classes the TV glamour boys apparently skipped.

The nucleosynthesis of the heavy elements (C to U) and their subsequent ejection from exploding stars is an inherently dispersive process. Eventually, here and there, some heavy matter will aggregate to form a protoplanetary cloud which can then produce planetary bodies. Inevitably, some of the heavy matter is pulled into massive bodies dominated by the presence of thermonuclear fuels- that is, hydrogen and helium. Sufficiently large accumulations of these two highly abundant elements will compress and initiate a self-sustaining fusion reaction of hydrogen to form the (n+1)th generation of stars. All told, some heavy matter accumulates to form of planetary bodies while some of it siphons into the next generation of stars.

It is within the ability of gravity to concentrate matter into smaller volumes of space as a dense, bulk phase. The geometric shape that allows all of the mass to be as near the center of mass as possible is the sphere. This is why we don’t see planets shaped like cubes, pyramids, or ponies.

Once cooled well below incandescence, the matter in a sufficiently constituted and situated planet may begin to self-organize into chemical phases. Along the lines of the Three Bears allegory, Earth is parked in an orbit that is just right for the presence of liquid water. Irrespective of the needs of life, liquid water is critical for the eventual concentration of some elements into ore bodies.

Earth has a gas phase blanketing a liquid phase which wets much of the bulk rocky phase of the planet. A generous portion of water circulates in the maze of fractured recesses of the planetary crust. In the case of Earth, we know that our planet has a fluid core within a solid shell. This molten phase in the core energizes a kind of convective heat engine that will drive the shuffling motion of tectonic plates and episodic volcanic mass transfer on the surface.

Matter has gravitationally self-organized at the planetary scale on the basis of density. But what is perhaps most interesting to a chemist is the phase composition of the planetary solid matter. On cooling, a body of magma will sequentially produce precipitates representing different chemical substances. Over geological time this igneous rock may experience modification by the hydrothermal action of hot water under high pressure. Depending on its circumstances, parts of the formation may be depleted of soluble constituents or it may receive a deposit of new mineral species.

On the scale of planets, the earth has self-organized into bulk phases of matter- Solid, liquid, and gas. But at a much smaller scale, the earth self-organizes into domains of chemical substances. This is evident by simple inspection of a piece of granite. A piece of pink granite shows macroscopic chemical domains of potassium feldspar, quartz, and mica. While these three mineral components of granite are compounds and not pure elements, they nonetheless represent self-organization of species based on chemical properties.

The forces that drive chemical differentiation in mineral formation are ultimately thermochemical in nature. Large differences in Ksp lead to partitioning and phase separation of distinct substances. Subsurface formations may be approximately adiabatic on a short time scale, but over deep time they can slowly cool and equilibrate to yield a sequence of fractional crystallizations of metal carbonates, oxides, silicates, and aluminates giving rise to a complex bulk composition.

Speaking only for myself, coming to an understanding of how mineral deposits form is a kind of hobby. If I wanted immediate answers to specific questions, I suppose the most expedient thing would be to consult a geochemist. But where is the adventure in that? The answers are not the fun part. The real adventure is in the struggle to find the best questions. As it often happens, once you can frame the problem sufficiently, the answer falls out in front of you. Whoever dies with the greatest insight wins.

A Day Trip to the Caribou Mining District

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The ghost town of Caribou, Colorado, sits a few miles west of Nederland. As a group the mining towns of Caribou, Nederland, and Ward reside at the northeastern extreme of the Colorado Mineral Belt. This mineral rich formation cuts diagonally across the state, terminating near Durango in the southwest part of Colorado.

Every western state has its mining districts. The eastern reaches of the USA have hard rock mining districts as well. The Appalachians have a long history of hard rock mining. An example of eastern hard rock mining activity is the Foote spodumene mine in the Kings Mountain district in North Carolina.

The Ghost Town of Caribou, Colorado (Copyright 2009 all rights reserved)

While the Caribou district was previously known primarily for silver and tungsten, current hard rock mining operations by Calais Resources is targeting silver and gold. A blurb on the Calais website says that they do not use cyanide extraction in Colorado.

Calais Resources Comstock Shaft (Copyright 2009 all rights reserved)

This weekend the town of Nederland is celebrating its mining history with a miners festival. There were feats of strength and skill on display.

Hand drilling competition in Nederland July 2009

Across town at the Mining Museum, a 1923 Bucyrus 50-B steam shovel was in operation. This 130,000 lb beast was powered by an antique air compressor this afternoon because the boiler is not servicable. It turns out that this very machine was one of 25 taken to the Panama Canal to move dirt and rock. All were scrapped at the canal but this one. The canal was finished in 1914, so it must have been used for modification of the canal workings.

This machine was in service at the Lump Gulch Placer a few miles south of its present location until 1978. Bucyrus is still an ongoing concern in the mining equipment business.

Bucyrus 50-B Steam Shovel (Copyright 2009 all rights reserved)

As one drives into the Ward area from the north, the rock type evident in the road cuts changes. South St. Vrain canyon is largely granitic in nature. As one moves south into the Mineral Belt, the road cuts plainly reveal that a new dominant mineral type is present. Hematite or other iron oxide species are extensively represented in the rock.

My reading indicates that many metal ore bodies are the result of extensive hydrothermal modification of fractured or disturbed formations. Metal sulfide saturated, superheated water penetrates a disturbed formation leaving precipitates forming vein structures. In this way, many metal species are mobilized on the basis of solubility properties and are transported and concentrated leaving deposits enriched in a variety of useful metals.

The superheating of deep ground water and the subsequent partitioning and concentration on the basis of physical properties like solubility and volatility are what make the recovery of many elements possible. Without these concentration mechanisms many scarce elements would be too diluted in the parent formation to be feasibly isolated commercially.

Pyrite vug from a tailings pile (Copyright 2009 all rights reserved)

What Th’ Gaussling has found is that, while a PhD in Organic Chemistry isn’t entirely useless as a background for understanding rocks, it is closer to useless than I’d like. Edgemicated as I may be in a skinny band of chemistry, I have a lot yet to learn about minerals and petrology.

Converting NYC’s Central Park into Manhattan Airport

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There is a website by the Manhattan Airport Foundation dedicated to the proposition that Central Park in New York City be converted into a regional airport. From their press release-

NEW YORK, NY, July 15, 2009 – For the past three years The Manhattan Airport Foundation has been quietly laying the groundwork to provide New Yorkers with a most fundamental urban amenity: access to viable air transportation. And today, TMAF releases its much-anticipated Stage One call for entries to a hand-picked group of top architecture firms worldwide in what is sure to be one of the most closely-watched design competitions in recent memory.

This has to be some kind of a joke. What a horrible place for an airport. Even if the people of NYC consent to the loss of a large greenspace in the middle of their high density glass and steel jungle, there is the issue of air traffic. Do these people understand how loud jet aircraft can be? Someone should remind them that Hong Kong was so anxious to be rid of their mid-town airport that they built an artificial island to put it on. Imagine jet traffic lumbering in on final approach over the tops of the buildings in Manhattan? It might even drown out the sound of honking taxis.

Even better, imagine the noise of jets on departure, clawing for altitude at full power trying to get out of the Manhattan airspace? Imagine the the roar of jet engines reflecting off of the skyscrapers from 777’s and other heavies on their takeoff rolls. Power failure on takeoff? The skyscrapers downrange will absorb the impact energy.

Yep, this has to be a gag of some kind. Imagine someone actually trying it? Pffft!

Is Private Sector Buggery Better than Gov’t Incompetence?

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Healthcare in the USA is wildly expensive and is growing more so at a rate that exceeds inflation. This is well known. The battle for healthcare reform in DC is bogging down under the weight of private interests and infighting. Soaring rhetoric from both left and right is mistaken for intellection and reason. It is evident that the fix to the problem was started before there was a clear understanding of the variables.

If you look at healthcare as a manufacturing activity with labor, capital equipment, and materials as input and some sort of health benefit as the output, you can start to see what cost inputs may begin to dominate. Of course this is very simplistic, but hang with me.

A round of health care involves attention by highly trained and expensive labor. A health care worker can only attend to one person at a time, though that worker may have many patients under his/her supervision. If a patient is stabilized, the care worker can also attend to other patients and achieve some sort of parallel production for better cost containment. In the heirarchy of medicine, the docs are managers who provide oversight to nurses who manage the patients. Docs also do consultations, examinations, and perform surgery, so they are not pure people managers- they get their hands dirty. Docs are a unique class of management all by themselves.

To exaggerate the effects of labor costs, imagine if you had a doc or a nurse picking strawberries, how expensive would the strawberries be? Even if Dr. Picker was very fast, the berries would be expensive. To have reasonably priced berries you have to find workers who will do the work at a lower wage. Lower wages derive from an abundance of willing labor.

In the end, medical schools control the scarcity of physicians by controlling enrollment. And the enrollment is defined by the curriculum, faculty size, and the particulars of the coursework- availability of clinical experiences, lab space, equipment, etc. But, you have to wonder what would happen to medical costs if there was less labor scarcity.

The most important resource a medical school has, other than faculty, might be the university hospital. What if more hospitals had medical schools rather than the other way around? I don’t think that the existing medical schools have absorbed all of the bright candidates out there.

Health care is a kind of economic chimera. The recipient of medical treatment is not the person in control of the costs. Physicians prescribe the type and extent of resources and the insurance companies release the funds. The medical establishment receives payment for services irrespective of outcome. Insurance companies profit by denial of services. The patient is left to sort out how to get the best value from available treatment.

American medicine is very much influenced by technological triumphalism. New and expensive materials and devices hit the market all of the time. The question every potential marketer of medically related items must ask is- will the docs use or prescribe it? The most powerful instrument in medicine is the physician’s pen. The question for drug and equipment makers is, how do you get the docs to use their pens to your advantage?

The view that a disease or an injury is a sales opportunity is what drives for-profit clinics and hospitals. Without chronic disease, accidents, and sporadic outbreaks of mayhem, growth and profit in the healthcare industry might be more static.

So in the end, who do you trust? Do you put your faith in the private sector whose avowed goal is to profit on your illness? Or do you trust the government which, though accountable to its citizens, is prone to profound organizational inertia and a lackluster draw to talented staff? This is the balance of opposing forces the fools in Washington are trying to sort out. Howard help us all.

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