As I drove out of Johannesburg, I noticed piles of excavated material along the toll road and guess they might be mine spoils.
Mine spoils along the side of N12 toll road.
What I hadn’t realized is mine spoils also occur throughout Johannesburg. I knew mining was a big in South Africa — but I didn’t appreciate how much mining there might be or how obvious it was. And, in fact, I just watched an amazing film, called Jozi Gold, about the impacts acid mine drainage and mine spoil dust impacts from abandoned gold mines and a Joburg activist named Mariette Liefferink.
Since being here, I have learned that about 1/3 of all the gold in the world came from mines around Johannesburg. In addition, it turns out South Africa depends on coal — in fact, over 75% of the energy produced in South Africa is from coal and South Africa supplies 92% of the coal burned in Africa.
The gold formations are super unique to South Africa, and their origin is still debated — but they see to have been formed about 3 billion years ago under anoxic conditions. While coal formations were more recently created, during the Carboniferous (358.9 – 298.9 Mya), from decomposing woody plants were buried and heated for millions of years.
For South Africa, the northern and eastern margins of the Kalahari Craton were characterized by broad wetlands that would later become the source coal resources in the Ecca rock group.
Associated with these mines are the power plants that emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a concentration over 410 ppm (pre-industrial concentrations were 280 ppm). Of course, this is only one impact of coal mining. And even more odd, I am typing this during a “load shed”, where rolling black outs are implemented in South Africa. The reasons for these 2 and 1/2 hour blackouts seems quite obscure and for most of the South African residents I talked there is a certain acknowledgement of frustration about the state of affairs and vague references to corruption and/or incompetence.