tens of thousands of finickiness is a saving american lives during the coded 19 that they came to the u.s. by a better life but at what cost. 11 east investigates and just say. this

is techno innovations that can change lives the science of fight fire we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and we're doing it to be unique winnick. this is a show about science. by scientists. techno investigates gold at any cost the free travel deep into the rain force of prove these illegal mining operations except for miles and miles away from the main highway to uncover a gold rush that's turning lush jungle into utter devastation high pressure water hoses and blasted out and it's not. not just the lame people are stepping in to

murder and i'm filled torahs a minute to molds i've conducted extensive research in this rain forest so this story is personal really pains me to see this breed to davis and is a biologist specializing in ecology and evolution now she shows us the high tech tools that are exposing what even the i can't see so where it's blood red that's where the mercury pollution is most intense we will share our findings with lindsay moran she's an ex cia analyst that's our team everything we've been saying it's for this no it's do some signs. hey guys welcome to techno i'm photo was joined by lindsay moran emirates of davison this upcoming episode is an important one to me takes place in true or have done a lot of my research and it is

a tale of contrasts we will see rain forest full of new species and then we will see the devastation that humans have done to extract gold and as we know with devastating stories like this where there's a lot of damage science can play are all here not just in monitoring and discovering what's going on but in trying to help process i think this is a story having looked at some of the images that one image of the devastation pretty much says it all absolutely this is an important story it's one that's very near and dear to my heart and it starts in the proving rain forest. and. the amazon rain forest for more than 50000000 years it's been a cradle of life. this is what pristine rain forest looks like. rush. untamed.

bursting with wildlife. but maybe not for long because the soil underneath is laced with gold and the human desire for it can turn all of this. into a toxic waste land like this. this is love pompa in the buffer zone of the tumble pot to national reserve it's part of more than 100000 acres of rainforest improved that have been decimated by an illegal gold rush. to investigate techno traveled deep into prove to a region called bodger it did the us the mother of god it's one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet and the source of 70 percent of the illicit gold produced each year in peru on a flight into the area called my strong look out the window at all but.

we arrived at the model not the regions capital in a gold mine. is what. an estimated 30000 illegal miners work in modern day that the us chances are you might find some of them here to sell gold or buy equipment i stopped in to one of the shops to look around at a place called amazon gold and right we walk in and there's a sign this is going to order me i buy gold and as i exchange my money there was a little scale right in front of me still had some gold dust on it from past exchanges but this sign was removed as soon as our camera was spotted. her to my mother who is also a place in transition while many of its roads are still dirt paths the new intro she and highway his opened up the area to the wider world people come from all over

the country to work the goal feel to hear mother louise ferdinand. this directs the carnegie amazon mercury ecosystem project he's been studying gold money toxic legacy in the amazon since 2000. so now miners have better access to the remote force they can get their equipment there everything's easier because of that highway everything's easier it's essentially part of the perfect storm that is mother. so not only do you have a brand new highway that makes transport easier you have record high gold prices and the preexisting condition of extreme poverty. tell me about this illegal gold mining what is a process where really on the edge between the amazon in the end. in a row jand over millions of years has worn down the rocks of the andes which are gold rich and all that sediment has washed down the river. next stop

a mining area near look pumpa but that can be dangerous for an outsider. the only way into this spot is on the back of a motorbike. the going is tough. and . makeshift bridges don't always hold up. as we get closer to trees gives way to something hard to grasp. impossible to put into words. and. so where we are now should be rain forest and get the rain but the forest is missing having done so much work in the areas that have person running forest it

really pains me to see it as the only way to get a handle on the devastation is to under. stand how illegal miners get to the gold. they start by clearing the trees so the process is one that's very very primitive. you use high pressure water hoses and blast it out. of water dissolves the soil removing anything in it that's organic you concentrate it using sluices which kind of looks like a slide where you run a slurry of the sediments over carpets. which captures the tiny flecks of gold that you find in the sediments the process can turn primary rain forest into this in a matter of days. something in the bud this is president of a small community of miners who work them on one river nearby even she was disturbed by the level of destruction other miners had done to this land.

and that the. better they quantify it on but mining does more than strip of forest bare miners bring in mercury to extract those tiny flecks of gold. mercury has a very unique characteristic of binding with gold forming an amalgam. for a minor it's almost like magic if there's any question as to whether or not this area was contaminated with mercury the answer is right here. in the film amazon gold documented miners working with mercury at a mine deep in the rain forest people are stepping into mercury people are stepping into that mix of sediment mercury and water and stopping on it like you would grapes. because you need all those little pieces of gold to touch the mercury to be able to capture it manu any miner john valdez works with mercury almost every day

and he has moved choreo it into the. mystic if you can use a better but i don't know. and i don't have the money at. all to look at it whatever it is for you don't know yet that the. miners can also be exposed to mercury vapors that's because once they extract their malcolm they have to burn off the mercury to get to the gold so these miners are touching mercury they're breathing mercury one of the health effects so the top american way that these miners are exposed to is extremely toxic especially when you breathe it. in starts to affect that liver kidneys the digestive system and starts to affect the central nervous system. today the money miners aren't working because of the rain but john bubba's showed the equipment he used just 2 days ago to burn mercury off

a piece of gold. everything we've been saying it's for this is about 3 grams of gold which translates into $100.00 which the average worker here could make in about 3 days. that's a lot of money. the average for worker makes less than $200.00 a month that lure of gold is changing the face of the amazon as jungle is replaced by mining camps like this magnets for crime underage prostitution and poverty. symbols of gold at any cost. in 2013 hunting images of the toll illegal mining had taken on the proving amazon went viral the video was taken by the carnegie airborne observatory a high tech plane developed by greg cason or from the carnegie institution's

department of global ecology. what is it about these mining activities that are so destructive from let's say from an environmental perspective 1st coal miners not only remove the forest to go down below the soil surface down into what would be called the mineral soil below the biologically active part of the soil so deep in the soil that there isn't a science to tell us that there's forest could ever recover. the devastation exposed from above was dramatic but it was also only part of the story the aircraft but south fitted with all sorts of cool technology but how did you use some of that technology to 0 in on what was happening in terms of gold mining yeah one of the key technologies on board the plane is a laser imaging system what it does is we fire laser beams out of the bottom of the plane the lasers can penetrate all the way down to the forest floor and so what we end up doing is we end up imaging the forest in very high fidelity 3 d.

. most of the work that had been done on this gold mining problem was using satellites that see some of the larger mines we started finding that there was a much larger contribution from the thousands of small mining operations that weren't known and suddenly we had a problem to report the rate of gold mining expansion tripled after the 2008 local recession if you are on a typical amazon river before seems like it's intact all around you but this is that same river that we just were on in the boat. when we peel the forest back we reveal the ground which is shown on the right here and what we see here are gold mining operations there so by and large they're said back from the river's edge so that they are being executed clandestinely the observatory also has a one of a kind spectrometer which can detect chemicals in the forest below including

mercury our system is unique that it can measure $420.00 channels of light all at the same time from the ultraviolet to the visible part of the spectrum that we see in to the infrared into the short wave infrared its ability to do that gives us access to a key scientific breakthrough which is the ability to measure chemicals in the environment because chemicals shine in different wavelengths of the spectrum. this video from the observatory shows one of the large mining areas in the tunnel part a buffer zone here's how the spectrometer sees that same mining area so where it's blood red that's where the mercury pollution is the most intense so it's basically like a signature of contamination of severe contamination and then these blue areas are porous that have no mercury in them and these are also illegal mining activities

these large cleared areas all of this in. illegal while the spectrometer can see mercury contamination from the sky luis ferdinand is studying where mercury goes on the ground. where else is a smoker and because the mercury is dumped into the rivers and lakes in dan gets into the food chain bacteria in the water convert the mercury into something even more toxic than organic compound called methylmercury which is easily absorbed in the digestive system mercury unlike many other pollutants magnifies every time it goes from one link in that food chain to the next so a fish at the top of the food chain in a contaminated region can have mercury levels millions or tens of millions of times higher than the water in which they swim where does that fish end up in many cases it ends up on the dinner plate of people that live hundreds of miles downstream

from. the east for him and his and his team attested hair samples of more than a 1000 people throughout the model of the the u.s. more than 75 percent 10 levels above the limit is considered safe by the environmental protection agency some as high speed 33 times the limit. in this little. one. as a legal case because. they. can look at this one most. of the time if you can vary. over time mercury impacts the central nervous system it could cause problems with vision hearing and memory at high levels it can cause brain damage to unborn babies if you talk to minors you say hey this is a problem how do they usually respond usually. they don't believe because they

don't see the immediate effects because the type of exposure that you see here is a chronic one. by 2012 the price of gold was over $1500.00 an ounce in illegal mining had eaten away more than 100000 acres of proven rain forest in moderate videos alone. the proven government decided to get tough troops went into mining areas and camps and equipment the strikes were part of a multi-pronged strategy according to her nest old as luna a former advisor to proves ministry of the environment study g involved police operations and the prosecution of the orse offenders and it involved. financial intelligence to connect the dots in follow the money in see who are the

big bosses the crackdown led to violent clashes between miners and police but it didn't stop illegal mining they sent in the military thousands of police what impact to that it's been a very temporary. it's so profitable that you can loose cover $1000000.00 in machinery and 2 weeks later join back in business it is that profitable this strategy also includes a process of legalizing some mining operations outside of protected areas but only if miners can prove they have proper permits and a plan to deal with the environmental impact it is impossible for many of them and that's the other part if people are never going to be able to be formal to put the telephone and start dealing with the. techno also visited prue's ministry of the environment in lima so there is this formalization process how are the miners

responded to this in some way well in some not so would because sure it is more easy to work outside of the world for because it's more a trip that is why we need to have very clear ways for describe to me these interdiction to crack down on some of these areas how was it how does it go in some way good but on the other which is very difficult to maintain that kind of interdiction because we cannot do it every day so sometimes we pull out these people from the 4 b. and so on in 2 or 3 weeks there are coming back to the same place why can't you do it every day why can't you come back every 3 weeks because they are also you do see some waste while boyd interdiction mischler for example in some places in the tumble buffer zone they were there working by night is inside the tumble part of buffer zone. it has been the target of more than one military interdiction yet our

cameras caught this current mining operation at the pompa in broad daylight many of the real notable remains are allies of mine in the rugged the corruption in the air not on the tory want to grow by seeing the fulfillment of their role in the service we need to show to good people but there was subsidies ne they for miserably failed to put enough sheen even small parts of the into the start the the government self approved at the moment of a total abandonment of the nishat i left the ministry over 6 months ago why did you leave the ministry i live the ministry because of a but. from government in terms of environmental standards they approved a new law that weakens the ability of the ministry of environment to both create protected areas in go after a moment of transformations i was there to help not to be part of recent soil left

techno also traveled into the hearts of the tumble pot to national reserve it's a place so protected that we had to register at 2 control stations on the way. yet even the park guards seemed overwhelmed. me nurse no i. know us i miss him but i asked. him how we saw miners working the river just a short distance away from the 2nd control station yuri torres was our guide on this journey into the reserves he now makes his living by helping people experience the breathtaking beauty of the rain forest as he knows the rain for so well he spots a saddleback tamarind monkey with a baby on its back during our interview but torres used to make his living off the jungle as a gold mine or one of us or them either you don't really care about 40. 03 tourists his father and his brother still make their living as illegal gold miners and you

talk to them about the dangers about the environment yes they do it's a big big deal do you worry about your father and your brothers as miners yes yes they do i worry about everyone's away from of the if they don't mind what i did. was very sudden it's such words we're talking to some of the most well you know you go to the burbs forests birth places where you could spin to for the worse what she just what's taking place in one branch of 13 in the we the lie of the sun shine some different things done buses in the school way. become better because of that i am absolutely convinced that human beings of all right to nature it makes us stronger.

so phil you've traveled a lot on a lot of research in that region but this was the 1st time that you had seen this and been to these areas how did it affect you emotionally i've seen it from the plane anytime i fly into this area and i've always heard about it but to actually see it firsthand was unbelievable really made me want to do something and make sure that people know how big of an issue this is i have to tell you to feel i mean just learning about this strikes a very emotional cord for me too because this is my part of the world not peru but bolivia and bolivia is part of this equation here i mean there is a lot of mining activity gold mining in bolivia as well but the issues that are going on with the magnitude of the illegal activity in peru has been spilling over into bolivia so there's a lot of gold contraband that's going through people to get water and we're getting export. kind of under the radar which is really really crazy it's a huge issue about ours about $3000000000.00 an ounce of gold going through bolivia

huge amount is this similar to or more complicated than say blood diamonds like as a consumer what can i do to make sure i'm not contributing to the problem if i wear gold jewelry you know the advantage of the diamond problem it is just this dress to go on the ground but you can actually track it down and you can figure out based on its chemistry where it came from with gold it's a lot more difficult to do because a lot of the gold gets exported it gets all melted together so you could have gold from prove mixed with gold from croatia and all of that could make a necklace found that story really opened my eyes so thank you for that really sobering but important be sure to check this out next time during techno is we bring you more stories from the field of science.

the health of humanity is at stake a global pandemic requires a global response. w.h.o. is the guardian of global health delivering life saving tools supplies and training to help the world's most vulnerable people uniting across borders to speed up the development of test treatments and a vaccine working with scientists and health workers to learn all we can about the virus keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the ward and in the land advocating for everyone to have access to essential health services now more than ever the world needs w.h.o. making a healthy a world for you. for everyone. algis

the real world meets for remarkable bosnian winning survivalists after those closest to them were taken away never to return. some of the 8000 muslim men and boys killed in the strep anita massacre 25 years ago. heartfelt accounts from those left behind trying to move on from the pain of the past women who refused to die on al-jazeera. the politics of division that pushed india into the grip of a historical reckoning i am afraid to be closing on the one on achieving a trade but where do these ideas come from the tragedy of more lives how much you try to send the plates getting to school or a happy family all along the border joining me on distance here on the final part of my journey when i jus become

a target of the hindu 1st policy in search of india's soul on al-jazeera. unprompted and uninterrupted discussions from on london broadcast center. on al-jazeera. this is al-jazeera. hello i'm about to sin and this is the news our live from doha coming up in the next 60 minutes calls for roseanne nj in azerbaijan after 3 days of deadly clashes on the border with armenia china threatens to retaliate after president and his hong kong special economic status and puts.