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Alongside the accelerating paces of both mining and deforestation, the study found, there has also been an exponential rise in the use of mercury, which helps miners extract gold from the Earth. As a result, larger quantities of the toxic metal are ending up in the atmosphere and in Amazonian waterways and fish.

Together, the findings point to gold mining as an overlooked source of deforestation and environmental contamination in the Amazon, said lead author Jennifer Swenson, a landscape ecologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Until now, researchers have focused mostly on forces like agriculture, oil, logging and road construction.

"It's another blow that was not really anticipated," said Swenson, who added that the situation is particularly complex because Peruvian miners are among the poorest members of society. That makes it hard to recommend that people take measures like boycotting gold, which is unlikely to happen anyway.

"It's not like a big, bad company is doing this," she said. "It's a bunch of really impoverished people that don't have alternatives. What are they going to do for economic gain? There's not necessarily really a good solution. There's not an easy answer."

To see how artisanal mining might be influencing deforestation in the Amazon, Swenson and colleagues looked at satellite images of two gold-mining sites in Madre de Dios, Peru, dating back to 2003. Before that year, the area was a pristine swath of forest. But over the next six years, from 2003 to 2009, the images showed a loss of more than 6,600 hectares (16,000 acres) to make way for gold mining activity. That was more than was cut down over the same period to make way for settlements in the area. And the trend paralleled a meteoric rise in the price of gold, the researchers report today in the journal PLoS One.

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http://news.discovery.com/earth/gold-price...