Comments on: Potash mining on the Colorado River

By: Travis Schenck

Travis Schenck — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:48:00 +0000

I agree the view from Hurrah pass would be more beautiful without the ponds. I also love the view from the Anticline Overlooks as well.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:41:00 +0000

The BASFca Lines?

By: baronkarza

baronkarza — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:49:00 +0000

…and I know it’s not a Xeni article (and Maggie rocks), but the photo could use a “shocked cat” face in the lower left corner..

By: baronkarza

baronkarza — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:47:00 +0000

Polychrome Aztec Lions Seen From Space!

By: solo

solo — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:07:00 +0000

The area downriver from Moab is exceptionally beautiful. Right near Potash there are many areas with pethroglyhps and great technical slot canyons. The evaporation ponds are a major blemish. A view from Hurrah Pass (the other side of the river) would have been wild and exceptional if not for these ponds. I would like to see them go.

By: twichy

twichy — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:03:00 +0000

They forgot one:
http://www.aerialphotosofnj.com/_images/_photos/aerial/stock_aerial/aerial_photo_nyc_winter.jpg

By: J. Damion Williams

J. Damion Williams — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:23:00 +0000

http://g.co/maps/tgj68

We have something like this not but a few miles from our home in West Monroe, LA. In all the years I grew up here I never knew they were there nor the size they were until I noticed them on google maps. They serve some use for a local paper mill. What was most surprising about the size is that if you look just less than a mile away is the Ouachita River that divides Monroe and West Monroe.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:20:00 +0000

Unfortunately, nobody here will get that allusion.

By: dagfooyo

dagfooyo — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Surprised no one has yet made the obvious observation that…

Colorado is quite literally trading its birthright for a mess of potash.

By: Palomino

Palomino — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:12:00 +0000

Thanks Facet:

Here’s the Google maps short link~ http://g.co/maps/r9fcz

Remember to grab Oscar, blue dots will appear on the map, those are spots where photos were taken, you can place Oscar on those spots to open the image.

By: Travis Schenck

Travis Schenck — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:15:00 +0000

I’ve attached a couple of photos of the ponds taken on a family drive. Living in Moab, Utah the evaporation ponds are little more than curiosity viewed from Dead Horse Point State Park. The Ponds were made in the 1960s after an explosion and a cave in resulted in the death of 18 people. The Mine retooled it’s system to use the evaporation method in order to save both lives and energy as the evaporation process required less than the physical extraction process. Though the ponds are relatively close to the river they sit well above the river on a sand stone mesa below Dead Horse point. The potash and the salts are both naturally occurring to the Moab Area and many of the washes surrounding the Colorado River show natural deposits of the material which during flash floods run into the Colorado River. The Bureau of Land Management uses desalinization efforts to remove much of this salt from the river before it travels further down stream. While I understand the concern regarding mineral extraction to indicate this is polluting or destroying the ecosystem of the Colorado Platueau and River Basin is an exageration. Dams on the Colorado and Water Pumping stations feeding Water hungry states like Arizona, Califorina, and Nevada would seem to do more harm to this river than a small salt mine that uses a minute fraction of the water compared to somewhere like the Belagio or the numerous Gulf Courses of the Southwest. I know it’s easy to rail against one company instead of changing way we live ourselves but please the Jobs provided by the Potash mine are one of the few stable venues of employment in our community.

However if you’d like to discuss this more you should come and see the ponds for yourself. Moab is beautiful all year round and winter is a great time to escape the cold. Stop by our local history Museum I’ll give you a tour myself.

T Schenck
Curator Museum of Moab

By: Rayonic

Rayonic — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:56:00 +0000

I think he just read my first sentence about the salt byproduct being used.

Good point about the water usage, but I was just making a general comment about Environmental NIMBYism.

Short of banning it there’s always going to be a market for Potash. So where would we rather it come from — a country with environmental regulations or a 3rd world kleptocracy?

By: zuben

zuben — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:16:00 +0000

I snapped this image in July, 2010, on a commercial flight from Seattle, WA to Albuquerque, NM. I didn’t know what it was until now:

[IMG]http://i41.tinypic.com/6oe6bd.jpg[/IMG]

To my untrained eye, and judging by the elevations apparent in Ecoflight’s gallery, it appears that there is runoff into the Colorado River (lower right of image).

Though pretty, their images don’t really seem to portray the context that my accidental pic does.

Given, it was taken from ~30,ooo’ or so.

By: utar

utar — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:47:00 +0000

Weird that they focus on this operation… just down the river is a gigantic pile of radioactive waste that has been threatening the drinking water of millions for 50 plus years. Also the next time your buying your “organic” veggies remember this is where the “organic” fertilizer used to grow for them came from.

By: jimkirk

jimkirk — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:35:00 +0000

Nice design for a stained glass piece…

By: Spieguh

Spieguh — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:39:00 +0000

It only looks like it’s surrounded by nothingness. That particular area of Utah’s desert does happen to have quite a bit more going on than is apparent at first glance. Much of the non-bare rock areas are covered in cryptobiotic soil, a symbiotic combination of bacteria, algae, mosses and fungi, among other things. It builds multitudes of small pillars in the dirt, and forms a hard crust that helps prevent erosion. “Desert” != “Lifeless”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiotic_soil

By: thezarray

thezarray — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:03:00 +0000

Thoughts are: Out of all the mining in the moab area they’re focusing on the fertilizer related industry and not the uranium mines? Really?

By: Chip

Chip — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:47:00 +0000

1) I would argue that the pools themselves are quite attractive, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of “natural landscape” in Utah.

2) If it leaks, so what? You’ve spilled a bunch of salt water onto land that is already pretty damn barren. Not a lot lives out there, and what does still has millions of acres to wander around in.

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:19:00 +0000

Apparently the price of water is cheaper than the price to build a cover/greenhouse the brine and condense the vapor…

It’d be very “green” if they could do that. They would use probably 10% of what they do today.

By: yri

yri — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:07:00 +0000

Beautiful!

By: bfarn

bfarn — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:59:00 +0000

Clearly it’s an album cover

By: Chris Azure

Chris Azure — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:39:00 +0000

The thing is, these photos just make me want to encourage more of this sort of thing…

By: Carlos Cardoso

Carlos Cardoso — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:24:00 +0000

That´s inferior Potassium. Not even close the best Potassium in the world, from Kazakhstan.

By: taintofevil

taintofevil — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:19:00 +0000

Could you have replied to Rayonic with more than an eye roll? Are the actual concerns that it’s ugly (arguable) and might leak, or is there something more substantial? Using water from the Colorado seems like a bad idea generally at this point, but there should be some substance to the complaints. How much water are they using, how long has this been there, what is the actual risk to the river? The river has a lot of problems, but there’s no particular reason to believe that this is a significant one.

By: Rich Keller

Rich Keller — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

I get the same feeling from this that I did from Koyaaanisqatsi. The beauty of the image is at odds with the pollution.

This is just one abuse of the river. The Colorado River used to flow all the way to the Sea of Cortez. There had been a marshland at the delta. But now, it’s usually dry because people just need their golf courses and their green lawns in a desert for some reason.

By: Guest

Guest — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:58:00 +0000

i agree with your assessment of the fart he dropped.

By: syncrotic

syncrotic — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:56:00 +0000

Indeed, it looks like their concerns are primarily aesthetic.

Resource extraction isn’t always pretty… except in this case, it actually kind of is :)

It doesn’t quite match the natural scenery, but there’s no shortage of that… it seems like they’ve decided to take issue with a mine that has one of the most benign land disturbance effects of any I’ve seen.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:47:00 +0000

I think their concerns are that:

1) It changes the natural beauty of the land.
2) It can still leak, even if it has ways of communicating that to us.

By: daneyul

daneyul — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:45:00 +0000

Those bastards!

Who’s responsible for that barren, dead-looking landscape encroaching so closely on those beautiful ponds????

By: Lobster

Lobster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I think what he’s saying is that since it’s not the most harmful thing in the universe, it has no impact on anything at all.