The Earth Story

The city of Pripyat was abandoned after the Chernobyl Nuclear Meltdown. This videographer spent a week there filming above the city and walking through it as the forest slowly reclaims the land.

Videographer travels to a village that is still in tact at the foot of Sinabung volcano in Indonesia. That volcano has been erupting regularly since 2010, sending pyroclastic flows down its slopes and causing casualties. This village is now coated with ash, its within evacuation zones and abandoned, and seems to now be owned by goats and dogs.

A visit to the city of Pripyat, one of the most fascinating places on Earth, abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 30 years ago.

Machu Picchu or metallurgical memories?

This fantastic view reminds me of some ancient Inca city, perched on a mountainside, maybe hidden among the hills of the high Andes. But no, this is a more modern relic. A piece of industrial archeology. For this is a view of the old smelter site at the Chinkuashih Gold-Copper Mine, hidden among the green hills of Jueifang township in northern Taiwan.

Gold was first discovered here in 1889, and a gold rush ensued. But in 1895 Taiwan was annexed to Japan under a Sino-Japanese treaty. Previous panning activities became scaled up into industrialised gold extraction and smelting. Gold and copper were both produced, and by the second world war this site had become one of the largest smelter operations at East Asia, with British and Commonwealth prisoners of war set to work in harsh conditions. A large proportion remain at rest here, together with the empty buildings and industrial graveyard of a previous era.

Today it is the site of the "Chinkuashih Gold Ecological Park". After the closure of the mine, following a sulfuric acid leak from the copper smelter in 1987, it was abandoned, torn down and left in disrepair. It remains as a relic of the mining history of Taiwan, and now contains exhibits and an interpretive tour of the workings. These include the display of a 220 kg gold ingot in the gold pavilion, for some time the largest such ingot in the world.

Behind the ruin we can see a peak. This is a Pleistocene volcanic dacite (Mt.Keelung, unmineralised) standing tall. There are at least seven old dacite volcanoes in the Chinkuashih region. Many of them are mineralised and have been exploited for their ores.

~SATR

Image: A view of the smelter works at Chinkuashih. Source: © James Ko Chun Huang, Dept. of Earth Sciences, NCKU, Tainan, Taiwan.

Links:

http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=44620&CtNode=430

http://taiwanreview.nat.gov.tw/fp.asp?xItem=44620&CtNode=205