The Berkeley Pit is a former open-pit copper mine in Butte Montana, and now, one of the only places in the world where you can pay to see toxic waste. The sheer scale of this site is something to behold. In aerial photos, it appears simply as a huge black splotch.

The pit is one mile long by half a mile wide, and over 1780 feet deep, 900 of which are filled with extremely acidic water. The pit water also contains a high concentration of heavy metals and dangerous chemicals, including arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid. The water is the color of arterial blood, which yields to a vibrant lime green hue not far below the surface. If you were to drink this lovely concoction it would kill you by corroding through your digestive system before it even got a chance to poison you.

The waste water is so saturated with copper that Montana Resources is able to mine copper directly from the water. Processing 13 million gallons of water a day will produce a staggering 400,000 pounds of copper in a month.

In November 1995, a flock of migrating snow geese landed in the Berkeley pit water, and died. Over 342 carcasses were recovered. ARCO, the custodian of the pit, denied that the toxic water had anything to do with the death of the geese, attributing the deaths to a previously acquired infection. These findings were disputed by the State of Montana on the basis of its own lab tests. The pit now has a 24 hour bird watch program to prevent birds from landing in the water for more than a few hours.

Poisoning birds isn't the only thing the State of Montana has to be concerned about. There is a constant battle (a cold war, more than anything) to keep the water level in the pit from raising to a height where it would contaminate the entire ground water supply for the nearby city of Butte.

Interestingly enough, new fungal and bacterial species have been found to have adapted to the harsh conditions inside the pit. Intense competition for the limited resources caused these species to evolve the production of highly toxic compounds to improve survivability, some of which have been isolated from these organisms and show selective activity against cancer cell lines. Currently research continues.

The Berkeley pit was in operation from 1955 -- when several underground mines were combined to create it -- until 1982 when ARCO shut down operations and turned off the water pumps. Over the active lifespan of the mine approximately 320 million tons of ore and over 700 million tons of waste rock were mined from the Pit. In other words, it produced enough copper to pave a four-lane highway two inches thick from Chicago to New York, with enough left over to keep going to the tip of Long Island.

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