At 438,000 acres, the Okefenokee Swamp is one of the largest intact wetlands left on Earth. It’s also–once again–the subject of heated debate over the potential impacts of nearby mining.
Over a 30-year saga, multiple plans to mine titanium dioxide (the material that helps brighten the whites of Oreo filling, paint, and more) have been blocked; most recently, the Twin Pines Minerals company’s 7,700 acres were bought out in a $60 million deal with Virginia-based nonprofit The Conservation Fund.
Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources Professor Rhett Jackson and Professor Emeritus Todd Rasmussen, both IRIS affiliates, have long been investigating the science behind the swamp. In a new paper published last month, their findings are quite literally groundbreaking.
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” said Jackson, “but a wetland is not a wetland is not a wetland. Every wetland is fundamentally different in terms of its geochemistry, its hydrology, its geomorphology and its ecology–and the Okefenokee is unlike any place on Earth.”
In an article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jackson, Rasmussen and lead author Jaivime Evaristo discuss their findings: that the barrier between the Okefenokee and the underlying Floridian Aquifer, long thought to be impenetrable, actually allows some amount of water to flow in between the two.
Floridian Aquifer: An aquifer is a body of underground rock that stores water. This aquifer system spans approximately 100,000 square miles of area underneath Florida and parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. It serves as the primary source of water for nearly 10 million people.
Mining operations need a lot of water–the Twin Pines permits requested to pull around 1.5 million gallons per day–but with the paper’s evidence of connection between the two water bodies, it’s clear mining might have a far more severe impact than previously believed.
To learn more, check out the article from AJC here, and watch this CBS News video from earlier last year on the deal to save the swamp.