area to the wider world people come from all over the country to work the golf field here miles luis ferdinand. directs the carnegie amazon mercury ecosystem project he's been studying gold money toxic legacy in the amazon since two thousand. so now miners have better access to the remote force they can get their equipment there everything's easier because of that our 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 indies and erosion 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. in wet. and makeshift bridges don't always hold up. as we get closer to trees give way

areas all of this is illegal while the spectrometer can see mercury contamination from the sky luis ferdinand is studying where mercury goes on the ground. where else is mercury and up because the mercury is dumped into the rivers and lakes then 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. then the water in which they swim where does that fish and up in many cases it ends up on the dinner plate of people that live hundreds of miles downstream. louise for amanda's and his team attested hair samples of more than a thousand people throughout the model of the videos more than seventy five percent had levels above the limits considered safe by the environmental protection agency some as high as thirty three times t