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Manganese is a silver-colored metal resembling iron and often found in conjunction with iron. The earliest-known human use of manganese compounds was in the Stone Age, when early humans used manganese dioxide as pigments in cave paintings. In ancient Rome and Egypt, people started using it to color or remove...

The fill of the Mesoproterozoic Belt-Purcell Basin, which straddles the United States-Canada border within the Rocky Mountains of western North America (Fig. 1), consists of marine and nonmarine clastic and carbonate strata 15 to 20 km thick. Three giant metal-producing ore deposits or districts account...

Afghanistan has the potential to contain substantial metallic mineral resources. Although valuable mineral deposits have been identified, much of the country’s potential remains unknown. Geophysical surveys, particularly those conducted from airborne platforms, are a well-accepted and cost-effective method for obtaining information on the geological setting of a given area. This...

The transition and post-transition metals, which include the elements in Groups 3–12 of the Periodic Table, have a broad range of geological and biological roles as well as industrial applications and thus are widespread in the environment. Interdisciplinary research over the past decade has resulted in a broad understanding of...

The article provides information on copper and its various uses. It was the first metal used by humans and is considered as one of the materials that played an important role in the development of civilization. It is a major industrial metal because of its low cost, availability, electrical conductivity,...

The article offers information about the mineral molybdenum. Sources includes byproduct or coproduct copper-molybdenum deposits in the Western Cordillera of North and South America. Among the uses of molybdenum are stainless steel applications, as an alloy material for manufacturing vessels and as lubricants, pigments or chemicals. Also noted is the...

From September to November 2000, United States Fish and Wildlife Service biologists investigated incidents involving 221 bird deaths at 3 mine sites located in New Mexico and Arizona. These bird deaths primarily involved passerine and waterfowl species and were assumed to be linked to consumption of acid metalliferous water (AMW)....

Acute and chronic toxicity of copper (Cu) to a unionid mussel (Villosa iris) and a cladoceran (Ceriodaphnia dubia) were determined in water exposures at four concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC; nominally 0.5, 2.5, 5, and 10 mg/L as carbon [C]). Test waters with DOC concentrations of 2.5 to 10...

The global mining industry has invested a large amount of capital in mineral exploration and development over the past 15 years in an effort to ensure that sufficient resources are available to meet future increases in demand for minerals. Exploration data have been used to identify specific sites where this...

This report documents work at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Quality Laboratory (NWQL) to validate enzymatic reduction, colorimetric determinative methods for nitrate + nitrite in filtered water by automated discrete analysis. In these standard- and low-level methods (USGS I-2547-11 and I-2548-11), nitrate is reduced to nitrite with nontoxic,...

Soil gas, seeps, and soil were assessed for contaminants at the North Range Road Landfill at Fort Gordon, Georgia, from October 2008 to September 2009. The assessment included delineating organic contaminants present in soil-gas samples beneath the area estimated to be the landfill and in water samples collected from three...

The Cu-Co ± Au (± Ag ± Ni ± REE) ore deposits of the Blackbird district, east-central Idaho, have previously been classified as Besshi-type VMS, sedex, and IOCG deposits within an intact stratigraphic section. New studies indicate that, across the district, mineralization was introduced into the country rocks as a...

The Chokosna, Gilahina, and Lakina River basins, and the Long Lake watershed are located along McCarthy Road in Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The rivers and lake support a large run of sockeye (red) salmon that is important to the commercial and recreational fisheries in the larger Copper River....

The treatment efficiencies of two prefabricated stormwater-treatment devices were tested at a freeway site in a high-density urban part of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One treatment device is categorized as a hydrodynamic-settling device (HSD), which removes pollutants by sedimentation and flotation. The other treatment device is categorized as a stormwater-filtration device (SFD),...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of the Army Environmental and Natural Resources Management Office of the U.S. Army Signal Center and Fort Gordon, Georgia, assessed the hyporheic zone, flood plain, soil gas, soil, and surface water for contaminants at the McCoys Creek Chemical Training Area...

Tin was one of the earliest-known metals. Because of its hardening effect on copper, tin was used in bronze implements as early as 3500 B.C. Bronze, a copper-tin alloy that can be sharpened and is hard enough to retain a cutting edge, was used during the Bronze Age in construction...

The U.S. Geological Survey does regional, national, and global assessments of resources (mineral, energy, water, biologic) to provide science in support of land management and decision making. Mineral resource assessments provide a synthesis of available information about where mineral deposits are known and suspected to be in the Earth’s crust,...

Beach water and sediment samples were collected along the Gulf of Mexico coast to assess differences in contaminant concentrations before and after landfall of Macondo-1 well oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the sinking of the British Petroleum Corporation's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. Samples were collected at 70...

The Copper River Highway traverses a dynamic and complex network of braided and readily erodible channels that constitute the Copper River Delta, Alaska, by way of 11 bridges. Over the past decade, several of these bridges and the highway have sustained serious damage from both high and low flows and...

The Leadville mining district is historically one of the most heavily mined regions in the world producing large quantities of gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, and manganese since the 1860s. A multidisciplinary investigation was conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Colorado Department of Public Health and...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of the Army Environmental and Natural Resources Management Office of the U.S. Army Signal Center and Fort Gordon, Georgia, assessed the groundwater, soil gas, and soil for contaminants at the Vietnam Armor Training Facility (VATF) at Fort Gordon, from October...

Metal supply consists of primary material from a mining operation and secondary material, which is composed of new and old scrap. Recycling, which is the use of secondary material, can contribute significantly to metal production, sometimes accounting for more than 50 percent of raw material supply. From 2001 to 2011,...

Present-day High Cascades arc magmatism was preceded by ∼40 m.y. of nearly cospatial magmatism represented by the ancestral Cascades arc in Washington, Oregon, and northernmost California (United States). Time-space-composition relations for the ancestral Cascades arc have been synthesized from a recent compilation of more than 4000 geochemical analyses and associated...

The rare earth elements are not as rare in nature as their name implies, but economic deposits with these elements are not common and few deposits have been large producers. In the past 25 years, demand for rare earth elements has increased dramatically because of their wide and diverse use...

Volcanism is a major contributor to the formation of important uranium deposits both close to centers of eruption and more distal as a result of deposition of ash with leachable uranium. Hydrothermal fluids that are driven by magmatic heat proximal to some volcanic centers directly form some deposits. These fluids...