NASA Satellite Captures The Sudden Emergence of a ‘Golden’ River — And It's Not a Good Sign

In 2022, NASA (@NASA_Landsat) released a set of satellite images of South Africa’s Jagersfontein on X. Both were the same images showing the town captured from space, except for one thing. While the first image depicted a regular brown landscape with fissures, cracks, and uneven edges, the second image displayed a striking golden crease swirling in a river-like pattern, as if an artist had painted the barren landscape with shimmery gold leaf. But it wasn’t actually gold that the image displayed. It was rather a river of toxic gold that dribbled, sopped, and splattered the entire town when a dam exploded here a month earlier.

Back in 2022, the residents of Jagersfontein recurringly noticed that the mucky heap of sludge spewed from the diamond mine was towering day after day. Being home to one of the world’s oldest diamond mines owned by De Beers, the residents labored hard to extract lucrative diamonds and gems for the businessmen who would then sell them abroad for big money. So naturally, no one could stop them from doing what they were doing even though the toxic waste was piling up quickly and posing a risk to the dam. “We saw it a long time, that one day this thing will burst,” said Memane Paulus, a machine operator at the dam, told the New York Times.

On September 11, 2022, the dump embankment wall near the dam crumbled and so did the vulnerable concrete of the dam itself. It collapsed and sent a tumultuous deluge of accumulated mining waste gushing down the town. It killed at least one person, destroyed 164 houses, and turned the grassy landscape of Jagersfontein into a mushy wasteland that is now splodged with a slurry of this toxic waste, also known as “tailings,” as per SABC News.

According to Earthworks, tailings are a watery mixture of materials left over by mining, such as crushed rock, trace amounts of metals including copper, mercury, cadmium, and zinc; and additives used in the mining process, such as sulfuric acid and cyanide. This chemical cocktail makes the mixture appear gold to a distant observer, but it is far from the actual noble metal, gold.

Geologist Dave Petley analyzed the satellite images of this golden river and revealed that the plume of tailings reached around 1 mile wide and extended about 5.3 miles toward the southeast, according to NASA Earth Observatory. The gooey golden sludge then rushed north, spilling into the town’s rivers and streams, including the Prosesspruit. and probably Kalkfontein Dam. Eventually, the barrage of tailings made its way inside the water systems of the town which supplied water to its population for drinking and agriculture. In some areas, where the tailings dried due to heat, it left white and tan deposits which appear in the lightest parts of the images.

No one knows how long this thick clag of toxic metals will persist in clogging the pores of this South African town’s soil, but scientists are hopeful. If the material keeps on drying up, then eventually, the gloop will break down and will be lifted upwards by the winds or washed away by rain.