Early Agriculture in Arizona

I always enjoy watching dates been rolled back to the times that my own ideas fully support. I am comfortable that this region was influenced by Atlantean copper traders in the late second millennia BC and possibly sooner.

Here we have the rise of settled agriculture contemporaneous to the projected time of impact and outlasting it by a couple of centuries.

There is an old saying in fraud investigation to follow the money. In the Bronze Age, money was copper. Every good copper district in the Americas and elsewhere were potential sources for the raw material. The seamen came in their vessels and established trading factories and motivated the locals to produce the copper.

An echo of that mining impulse led also to the collection of gold in the Andes and South America. What woke me up was the remarkable fact that the Incas held gold reserves equivalent to several thousands of years of mining effort using indigenous methods. However you wish to recast those numbers, there was some explaining to do. The big one was why? Ignited by trader’s buying habits makes imminent sense and holding it then as a store of wealth and accepting it as taxes also makes sense. And just who were the Andean counter trades with? That those traders had disappeared while the currency system just went on and on actually works very well in the case of the Inca.

I got this out of a group called alt.archeology.moderated run by a chap who collects press clippings on archeology world wide and has been doing it for a good decade. The link to the source article got wrecked.

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient farming community at a site called Las Capas in Arizona. The settlement dates to 1200 BC-800 BC, the early agricultural period in the Southwest. The settlers at Las Capas created a system of canals now proven to be the earliest extensive irrigation system in the Southwest. These canals pre-date the Hohokam canals by 1000 years. This find has completely revised the history of organized irrigation in the Southwest. The canals were built in grids with earthen gates to regulate flow. The canals held running water 9 months out of the year. The area covers 100 acres and supported 150 people. The Las Capas people grew maize as their primary crop using popped corn to make tortillas. They gathered cactus fruit, mesquite pods and amaranth. Skeletal remains of the Las Capas people show they lived a healthy life. Circular pit houses have also been uncovered with charcoal remains used for cooking in shallow pits. They had domesticated dogs and other domesticated animals.

There are 7 other settlements nearby with evidence of canals there as well. A massive flood in 800 BC destroyed their society as the Las Capas people made attempts to rebuild the waterways and then abandoned their village.

KGB Commodity Corner

When I set out to write this article, I already knew my conclusions and the import. I then went out to find through google who else understood the same thing. I found just one lonely article written early last summer just as the oil market was rising up to hit the wall. Learsy makes a call to action that is not as compelling today because the hand of the market is quietly delivering the proper corrective measures.

For the last several years, the trading behavior of the commodity market conforms to a carefully manipulated market with large capital pools overwhelming the natural market. The reason I say this is that volatility has been absorbed. Also the price movements that took place fits that of a well organized exploitation of leverage through the creation of a secret corner.

It was operated primarily on the copper market and then spun out to exploit most of the other traded commodities. Even the natural laggards were mopped up and brought into play.

Here is how it works. You prepare the target market by getting control of some part of the supply so that you have at least that much ability to manage supply. One shipload on anything will create a scramble in the market to replace shortfalls.

Then you buy as many open contracts in the market as possible to draw down the trading inventory. The cash needed is around ten cents on the dollar of commodity. In the case of copper that would have been about ten cents per pound of copper. Once the entire known inventory is ordered, you jam the price up to a double. In the case of copper this is $2.00 per pound. Your holdings are now sitting on a one dollar profit which allows you to buy additional contracts using twenty cents worth of this newly acquired equity. You should be able to expand your holdings at least five fold. Most importantly, you are been supplied by mostly short sellers at this level who know this price is not sustainable in the real world. At this point, your only exposure is the initial equity.

However, you have access to State capital that is huge. You let the markets sort themselves out for a while and you encourage as much short selling as you can. This part is a lot of fun except it is a good way to go to jail if you are participating in a regulated market.

Once the short side hook is properly set, you spring the trap and jam the market through $4.00 per pound and you protect that market for as long as you can. In copper’s case this went on for at least two years. What happens is the short side of the market is also operating on ten percent margin and they must put up massive amounts of money. You are putting up huge money, but your huge profits make it far less onerous. Over two years, most short positions will collapse and be closed out releasing huge amounts of money back to the operator of the corner.

The surplus margin created allows you to conduct the same operation on the other available markets and lulling the bankers back to sleep because of the apparent diversification.

The commodity cornering operation produced massive cash while strangely enough having a modest impact on the respective demand for the product. A lot of this is because most commodities are on long term contracts and are hedged to begin with so losses take a long time to materialize. More importantly, metal content has been progressively minimized in all manufacturing over the past thirty years in exchange for organics. Thus the economic impact of all this was acceptable to the economy. Our economy can pay more for all this.

Of course the surplus margin helped set of runs in other commodities such as grains were a real long term corner is impractical.

In order to execute such a program it is necessary to have an army of minions who take your trading instructions and are able to operate throughout the globe accessing banks and trading facilities everywhere. There can be no possibility of disloyalty.

It is my conjecture that this was put in place and reached maximum control of cash and credit in the spring of 2008. This obviously makes it the greatest commodity corner in history and just as obviously illegal as hell.

Since they promoted such a huge amount of credit to start with, it is a good bet that they were substantial buyers of high yielding securities that can be carried on even five percent margin. At least that is what AAA used to mean. In other words they could have their cake and eat it while believing that their money was both secure and earning huge returns. Someone has a trillion dollars of former AAA paper somewhere and the global collapse got to someone somewhere. It cannot be all in offshore insurance schemes that are all lying to us.

I think though that hubris, or the need for another major lift, finally led them to take on the oil market. They were strong enough to do it so long as their calculation on demand was correct. Oil had to be sustainable at $200 per barrel or four times base as was copper and all other commodities. If buying collapsed then they were on their own and they would inevitably be overwhelmed.

Quite simply, they made their move and as the price made its way through $125 per barrel, it is a certainty that every end buyer diverted their product into the market to grab the cash. Their worst case was a spell of shortages and rationing. Best case, they would get to replenish at much cheaper prices. It is an industry that must have huge amounts in the pipeline at all times and short term diversion is much more feasible than it initially appears.

And then it all rolled over. The last of the displaced oil was liquidated in the $30 to $50 range and recent price recovery tells us that the last of the distortion is now fully resolved. Apportioning the losses is probably another matter. A lot of the cash likely was placed in illiquid securities that cannot be presently recovered, which means that the institutions cannot release funds.

There have been other great commodity corners in financial history and we always see the same pattern at work. When they break, all participants are wreaked.

If we then ask the further question of who could have orchestrated such a maneuver, we have only one possible prospect on the globe. The KGB has access to the oil production, financial reserves and far more importantly, they command the loyal operatives who can be printed as almost instant Billionaires and sent out into the world to await trading instructions. Without a large group of such minions it would be impossible to access foreign credit and trading capacity.

Of course, there is no evidence at all that this is what happened. It is merely a conjecture. It is also a great conspiracy theory that everyone can play with.

Russia was a major beneficiary of the run up in oil prices and a modest bit of prudence would have them in a strong financial position for a long time. So why are we hearing stories that they are in trouble? Did they really blow it? Did they really imbibe of the Koolaid? Why is it that they suddenly have deep pockets and short arms?

Raymond J. Learsy

High Oil Prices: Is That The 800 Pound Russian Bear Dancing In The Trading Pits

Posted July 8, 2008 03:40 PM (EST)

OPEC, speculation in commodities market, hedge funds, the falling dollar, peak oil theorists, all play a part in the current run up in oil prices. Yet one of the major players has escaped both scrutiny and careful analysis. Consider two items that were news this past month:

- Russia's new president Dimitri A. Medvedev, speaking to a group of foreign journalists made clear his and Russia's posture that the " United States is in no shape to give advice". He then went on to categorically declare that America is "essentially in a depression."

- A few weeks before Alexei Miller, chief executive officer of Gazprom made an eye opening forecast. Mr. Miller predicted on June 10th that oil prices would rise to $250 a barrel in the near future. Gazprom is Russia's largest company. It controls 16 percent of the world's gas reserves and 116 billion in oil and oil equivalent ranking it only behind Saudi Arabia and Iran as the world largest holder of oil reserves.

Now why would the head of Russia's largest and most prestigious company put his reputation and his company's reputation on the line by making such a seemingly rash prediction. Certainly predictions of ever higher prices serve the interests of oil producers but usually they are left to friendly analysts in the field. Could it be that Mr. Miller is absolutely sanguine about the issue, knowing the price game is cooked.

And President Medvedev making comments about an America in depression whose advice is no longer welcome by an ascendant Russia, itself having become the largest energy exporter in the world, stoking an economy that is now the fastest growing by far among the G-8. This, by a nation that still views America with grave suspicion as succinctly expressed only recently in an interview (May 30, Paris "le Monde") with Vladamir Putin the former President of Russia and KGB colonel and Medvedev's sponsor and mentor, as a "frightening monster".

For Russia this moment verges on the triumphal. A nation ascendant in benefiting handsomely from the fortuitous rise of energy prices. An America sinking into recession if not depression, the cost of energy, especially oil, strangling its economy and in turn its influence on the world stage. The shifts in world order are so profound, so unexpected one needs wonder whether the word fortuitous is appropriate relating to the price of oil. In essence the price of oil has done for Russia what the cold war Kremlin was unable to achieve given all its missiles, tanks and mind numbing divisions of men and armor. Could it be that the Russians through Russia's vast $500 billion in foreign currency reserves, or Gazprom itself, or perhaps even the KGB ,or any combination or variation thereof is gaming the oil futures market to Russia's great advantage and to America's and all oil importing nation's great detriment given the vast expenditures in armaments it would have taken to achieve an analogous result. Gaming the oil futures market would be chicken feed by comparison to the armaments cost needed to achieve the same relative status.

Unconvinced it could/does happen? Let me cite some examples and commentary. In a post here in entitled "The Trade That Brought Us $100 Barrel Oil Teaches Us to Be Afraid , Very Afraid" 1.7.08 focuses on the single trade that moved the price from $99.53/bbl to $100 on January 2 2008. That trade was for one contract representing 1000 barrels and required a deposit margin of $6750. Thus with that miniscule investment, and as long as that price was preeminent on the trading board, all oil produced or shipped reflected that increased price value or a one days increase of some $40 million given the 85 million barrels loaded and shipped each day. How's that for leverage? And then to help matters along the hedge funds stand ready to pitch in being intrinsically trend players, happy to pile on and sustain any trend real or creative.

In another post ("Oil at $111 a Barrel: We Are Being Sovereignly Screwed!", 3.17.08),The Sovereign Wealth Funds of the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar,Libyia, Algeria and of course Saudi Arabia were cited as having enormous wealth tied up in their sovereign funds with the means and certainly the incentive to game the futures markets of virtual paper barrels on commodities exchanges to support the price of wet barrels being produced in their home market. The Brazilian Sovereign Wealth Fund was cited because it has openly declared it will use its Sovereign Wealth Fund to support an ideal valuation of its currency the "real," given Brazil's export oriented economy. Here, clearly and candidly is a wealth fund declaring that its currency holdings would be used to pursue a policy in its specific national interest. This in glaring contrast to other wealth funds who are submerged in murky opaqueness without the slightest inclination toward transparency.

Are the Russians gaming the futures markets for oil? They are not innocents nor incompetent. When it comes to using elbows powered by their resources they will do what is necessary. Ask the Ukranians, ask the Europeans. Gaming the futures markets on the London or Singapore commodity exchanges or through electronic trading (please remember the markets offshore have a direct immediate impact on other markets throughout the world) would be a simple matter for the Russians as long as no one catches them out. Here one needs to remember that the Russian leadership is formed by KGB veterans.

What can be done? Given the evolution of pricing on our commodity exchanges and the paucity of oversight by our CFTC this is a job well beyond the CFTC's capabilities. It is Congress that must act. This administration, so in the thrall of the oil industry, whose modus operandi on matters of manipulation of oil prices is to do little or nothing whether it is confronting OPEC or putting teeth into the CFTC. It is Congress, in the interests of national security and rational markets, that must insist we engage the resources of the CIA to put a clear and bright light on this issue. Anything less would be a dereliction of responsibility.

Barry Fell and Atlantis

It has been thirty years since Barry Fell stirred up a hornet’s nest regarding his thesis of a long lasting European interaction with the Americas that began perhaps around the beginning of the Bronze Age and had died out before the current era, probably as a result of Roman suppression of the Celts and their deep sea fleet by Julius Caesar.

His strength was the interpretation of inscriptions in particular. To put it bluntly, he was the first to take them seriously and attempt their interpretation. He was also a linguist and expert in the art of epigraphy as well as a trained scientist in marine biology.

His death caused his initative to be shelved in the late eighties. He made extraordinary claims, showed extraordinary proof and was denounced in an extraordinary manner. They are still bad mouthing him to this day. He never deserved that, and for that matter no scholar deserves that.

I have observed that most scholars are successful because of their trained memories or unusual memory talent, usually in the form of an actual eidetic memory. I have also observed that when an idea is entered into that world that conflicts with their memory patterns, the natural instinct is to dismiss the idea. This makes it very difficult to pursue new ideas with this style of scholarship.

Not surprisingly, these folks usually avoid those areas of scholarship demanding sophisticated mathematical thinking and the like, although a friend of mine did dive into that world with an obviously eidetic memory and aced everything he touched. His measured IQ was at 185. I once introduced an idea to him that had been incredibly fruitful, yet he dismissed it immediately with a label and went elsewhere in his thinking. I was startled and I never disabused him.

My conjecture is that the more powerful the memory function the more difficult it is to shift mental gears and follow curiosity outside ones defined expertise which also excludes new material not already part of your world.

In any event there is currently limited material support for work in this field. The recent recognition of ancient city remnants outside the Straits of Gibraltar that conform in space and detail and best locale with the legend of Atlantis is another example. It took a non specialist (a mathematician) to tell the story. I also have the advantage of not having to protect an academic reputation so I can shout as loud as I like.

This piece here is the Los Lunas inscription of the ten commandments located in New Mexico using a script that conforms to script used around 1000 BCE.

http://www.asis.com/users/stag/Las%20Lunas%20Ten%20commandments

Of course the naysayers have shouted hoax. And perhaps a scholar steeped in Canaanite scripts took a trip into the desert sometime in the nineteenth century and set up this hoax. The hoax claim is thrown automatically against every inscription found everywhere.

The problem of course is that the hoaxer would need incredible knowledge of the script and sentence structure able to preclude error confirmed by forthcoming discoveries. The fact is that an inscription hoax fails to hold up in the face of new inscriptions. It starts to be the odd man out. I am very uncomfortable with the hoax argument. It still needs a crooked scholar who failed to profit from his discovery.

More compelling, the script is reminiscent of Celtic Ogam to the extent that it can be easily chiseled into stone. Both scripts are phonetic based and recently it has been established that Mayan script was also phonetic based.

As an aside, I never understood what the Mayans were doing until I realized their script was painted with a rather fat brush. The tools and media determine the nature of your script. Ogam was designed to be cut into a branch.

This is an example of Phoenician script from Tyre surely and perhaps the principle script of the city of Atlantis.

Recall also, like Lake Superior, that New Mexico is copper country and is accessible via the Rio Grande.

Plainly, the sooner Atlantis and its Atlantic mercantile empire is dug up and acknowledged the better for scholarship everywhere. What impresses me most is how accurate Plato’s report turned out to be. I am developing a healthy respect for ancient sources even if they lacked our vocabulary. By the time something was consigned to paper and many successive rewritings, it was thoroughly attested to unlike today low cost makes this aspect far less important.

Commodity Decline

While we have been regaled with the ongoing unraveling and reconsolidation of the massive US mortgage market, the rise and fall of the oil market is delivering another casualty. As my readers know, I called both the price run up past $100 per barrel and the turn at $145 per barrel. This price move was necessary to force the public to pay attention to our serious exposure to the presently inelastic condition of the supply side of the oil equation. We now have a global consensus for shifting out of the fossil fuel business and demand has been visibly throttled. I now expect a return to $65 per barrel.

Prior to the oil price run up we had a huge price lift in commodity prices. This created a huge amount of credit and has thoroughly funded the metals industry in a way not possible for generations. The ongoing oil price decline appears to be collapsing that long lasting bubble.

To give my readers a meaningful standard to work with, I will share one fundamental idea. All commodities are normally sold at a price very close to the real cost of production. The rationale is obvious. Higher prices allow all producers to ramp up production and to invest in technologies and new operations that will bring costs down. The only real constraint to this behavior is the time needed to make this happen. Well, guess what? We have had the necessary two to three years to dust off every mothballed project from the past two generations and blast them through permitting.

And now the credit in the commodity markets is evaporating.

Up to about three years ago, all copper mines worked against a copper price of around $0.70 per pound. This had been the average since the sixties! This had actually driven new mine development out of North America. But all mines worked against an operational break even of around that seventy cent mark.

I address copper in particular because it continues to be the leader in terms of mining innovation and cost cutting. When I first got into the business in 1972, it was still possible to contemplate mining a several million ton deposit carrying twenty pounds of copper to the ton over several years. Today that represents a month’s supply in most major mines. Such scale has permitted mining grades to hang around eight pounds to the ton.

What I learned early on was that this technology ultimately came to every other minable commodity. I know of deposits in certain commodities that would idle every other mine in operation if brought on stream.

Returning to copper, we have a commodity that requires three or four years to ramp up but then can be produced for well under $1.00 per pound. Yet we have been forced to pay $4.00 per pound and now are back at $3.00 per pound. This I see returning to around $1.50 to put everything back in balance.

Of course there are an army of analysts who will argue vehemently that this is not so. Oh well!

We have just been through an old fashioned commodity boom and bust carried out over three years. All the producers are flush with cash and are bringing fresh production on stream. This is also happening throughout the global agricultural business. This next year we will be awash with huge surpluses and a rapid global business recovery driven be suddenly lower costs across the board.

Importantly, the market has decisively signaled the need to vacate the carbon business and governments are getting mandates to do just that. This is giving us the time to do it right.

As I have posted, the simple shift now from diesel to LNG in the USA alone will release half of our demand for oil. The advent of THAI will let North America become the globe’s strategic oil reserve with perhaps two trillion barrels of producible reserves booked before we are finished. That is twice all the oil produced to date.

This all means that the economic rebound will be very strong for the next three years.

Berkeley Pit

This article on the Berkeley Pit in Montana is well worth the trouble. We are discovering new biological responses to extreme toxic conditions. An objective worth achieving is to encourage organisms that concentrate the metals and other free ions in the mine liquor. It may be necessary to actually feed them a lot of nitrates to accelerate the process.

I know of closed mines whose liquors were simply passed through a trough full of tin cans. This was sufficient to reduce the copper. In fact driving truck loads of tin cans down to soaking pad and leaving them there for a few months may not be a stupid idea. If I recall correctly, a ton of iron will naturally precipitate a matching ton of copper. This is today an eight fold jump in dollar value. Hmm!

There are many industrial waste sites that need resolution. Relying on biological agents is the only cost effective way of solving these headaches. It does take imagination and perhaps a prize for the best practical solution. At least with mine products, we are dealing with materials that are chemically active.

With the oil industry we are always dealing with some form of salty water which resists such elegant fixes.

What is not mentioned here is that once the Berkley pit fills up the hydrostatic head will block further significant inflow of leachate. The pit fluids will stratify and we will have a top layer of much fresher water derived from rain and snow. This can likely be safely released into the local water table and drainage system. If there is something unusual about the local water table, then now is a good time to see if it is possible to do any preventative work.

The Pit of Life and Death

Written by Richard Solensky on July 1st, 2008 at 3:09 pm

From DamnInteresting.com

Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn't always been so - it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was in charge of virtually all the mining operations. When running underground mines became too costly in the 1950’s, Anaconda switched to the drastic but effective methods of “mountaintop removal” and open pit mining. Huge amounts of copper were needed to satisfy the growing demand for radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles, computers, and all the other equipment of America’s post-war boom. As more and more rock was excavated, groundwater began to seep into the pit, and pumps had to be installed to keep it from slowly flooding.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

In 1995, an analytic chemist named William Chatham saw something unusual in the allegedly lifeless lake: a small clump of green slime floating on the water's surface. He snagged a sample and brought it to biologist Grant Mitman at the nearby Montana Tech campus of the University of Montana, where Mitman found to his amazement that the goop was a mass of single-celled algae. He called in fellow Tech faculty Andrea and Don Stierle, experts in the biochemistry of microorganisms. The Stierles had recently been trekking about the northwest, looking for cancer-fighting compounds in local fungi with great success. Coincidentally, the Stierles’ funding had just run out, and they needed a new project. They leapt at the opportunity to study these bizarre organisms.

After examining the slime under a microscope, the researchers identified it as Euglena mutabilis, a protozoan which has the remarkable ability of being able to survive in the toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit by altering its local environment to something more hospitable. Through photosynthesis, it increases the oxygen level in the water, which causes dissolved metals to oxidize and precipitate out. In addition, it pulls iron out of the water and sequesters it inside of itself. This makes it a classic example of an extremophile. Euglena mutabilisExtremophiles are organisms that can tolerate and even thrive in environments that will destroy most other living things. Some can even repair their own damaged DNA, a trait which makes them extremely interesting to cancer researchers. The Stierles reasoned that where there’s one extremophile, there may be others – most likely blown in by the wind. Given their previous successes with strange microorganisms, the researchers believed that the Berkeley Pit and its fledgling extremophile population could produce some medically useful chemicals.

The Stierles were so intrigued by the possibilities that they started work even before securing funding. A squadron of expert researchers was recruited from the undergrads at Montana Tech, and even from a local high school. They collected water samples, isolated microorganisms, and cultured them. The team eventually identified over 160 different species, but they lacked the equipment needed to isolate the interesting chemicals from the microorganisms. Shlepping around western Montana, the Stierles begged and borrowed time at other facilities while they doggedly processed the cultured organisms. Their tenacity led to the discovery of a number of promising chemicals. Three of these, berkeleydione, berkeleytrione, and Berkeley acid, came from species of the fungus Penicillium that had never been seen before, and were therefore named after the Berkeley Pit.

The next step was to see what effect these chemicals had, if any, on other living cells. Thanks to modern biochemical assay techniques, dozens of chemicals can be tested against one organism– or one chemical against dozens of organisms– in a single pass. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many compounds which attack cancer cells are also harmful to brine shrimp, therefore most modern assay tests include the brine shrimp lethality test as a standard procedure. The Stierles exposed swarms of tiny crustacean volunteers to the Berkeley Pit chemicals, and to their delight, five of the chemicals showed anti-cancer properties. Further tests revealed that berkeleydione helped slow the growth of a type of lung cancer cell, and Berkeley acid went after ovarian cancer cells. All five were passed along to the National Cancer Institute for further study.

Other researchers are looking into the Pit as well - not for cancer-fighters or other drugs, but simply for ways to help clean the place up. In 1995, a flock of migrating snow geese stopped at the massive pond for a rest, and at least 342 of them died there. Authorities now use firecrackers and loudspeakers to scare away migrating waterfowl, but there have been a few smaller die-offs nonetheless. Also, on certain mornings, a sinister mist creeps out of the Pit and wraps its tentacles around the streets of Butte. Citizens are understandably anxious about this potentially poisonous fog of doom. The water level is rising at a rate of several inches a month, and if unchecked it will spill over into the area’s groundwater in twenty years. That danger has earned the area the dubious distinction of being one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites. Normally such water is treated by adding lime to the water to reduce the acidity and remove much of the metal, however the Berkeley Pit is so saturated with undesirables that this process would produce tons of toxic sludge every day. Other methods are safer, but are prohibitively expensive. Currently, the EPA's plan is to focus on containment.

Grant Mitman believes that the best way to clean up the Pit is to use the algae that already live there. E. Mutabilis, for one, tends to grow in clumps. These clumps clean up their neighborhoods enough for other extremophiles to move in. These organisms would collect the metals within their own cells, and upon dying they would sink to the bottom and drag the metals with them. To Mitman, it’s all a matter of finding the right mix of extremophiles for a self-sustaining algal colony. Once the right mix is found, there are many other mine-contaminated waters awaiting treatment that could use a similar biology-based cleanup.

With metals concentrated at the bottom, and cleaner water at the top, the Pit could conceivably be reopened. The bottom sludge could be collected and processed for its ever-more-valuable metal content, and the water could be used for industry or agriculture. While it might not be safe to drink, the water could still be worth a quarter million dollars a year in a water-hungry West. In the meantime, the Pit has become a popular tourist attraction. There's a small museum and gift shop located well above the water level. A number of National Historic Landmarks related to mining are in the area, which has prompted some people to call for the creation of a National Park centered on the Pit. With luck, what was once the Richest Hill in the World could eventually provide riches of a different sort.