Carolinas may be home to new gold rush
10/17/2011
A Canadian mining company believes there are more than 3 million ounces of gold at a historic mine it’s working to revive near Kershaw.
If Romarco Minerals’ estimates about the amount of gold still in the Haile Gold Mine, it would be worth more than $5 billion at current gold prices.
Toronto-based Romarco reopened the Haile Mine, originally established in 1837, earlier this year and expects to pour its first gold bar there in early 2014, Chief Executive Diane Garrett told Reuters this week.
Once environmental impact studies and permits are complete, Haile will be the only modern gold mine east of the Mississippi River, Garrett said, and the first since the Kennecott Minerals mine closed in nearby Ridgeway, in 1999.
Based on the proven gold reserves found in samples, the Toronto company estimates it has 3.1 million ounces of gold at Haile. The mine will produce an average of 150,000 ounces of gold a year for five years, according to its website, the wire service reported.
New Guinea’s linguistic reservoir endangered
10/17/2011
New Guinea is regarded as the world’s greatest linguistic reservoir, being home to more than one-sixth of the world’s languages, at least 1,000 in all.
However, that status may change within the next century as many of the native tongues are in danger of dying out, many now having fewer than 1,000 speakers.
“It’s Indonesian more and more,” said Yoseph Wally, an anthropologist at Cendrawasih University in Jayapura, Indonesia. “Only the oldest people still speak in the local dialect,” he said.
In some villages Wally visits, not a single person can understand a word of the traditional language, according to Agence France-Presse.
“Certain languages disappeared very quickly, like Muris, which was spoken in an area near here until about 15 years ago,” he said.
It’s a problem not unlike those facing speakers of Native American languages, many of which have become extinct or on the verge of extinction in recent decades as village elders die off and younger members turn exclusively to English.
