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Comment by pwarner | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_contamination_in_Calif...

> Historically, 10-30% of mercury was lost in the mining process, resulting in widespread contamination of river and lake sediments

That is a LOT! That explains the frequency of red areas on the map. What a shame.

Here in BC it's a similar story with the ocean and dioxins from industrial effluents. You can't harvest shellfish around most of southern Vancouver Island. It seems like everyone has a story of poisoning their own food and water.

> That is a LOT! That explains the frequency of red areas on the map.

It seems like most the ones I clicked on weren't polluted by mercury (even if my local sources were). Looking closer, the north seems to be mostly mercury pollution (at least inland), and the south seems to be varying sources (chlordane, dieldrin, PCB, DDT).

Ah, okay then. Coincidentally I clicked around and mostly saw mercury and a couple seleniums, so it seemed like mercury was the biggest issue. I wonder what the others are caused by... I'm guessing industrial effluents.

I remember flying over the South Island of Japan. There are all these beautiful sandy beaches you can see from the air and nobody on them. I asked my host about that and he said, no one goes swimming because it's polluted.

Off topic, but holy crap, I thought the donation requests couldn’t get any more intrusive, yet somehow they did. Over two full screens’ worth of text to scroll past on my iPhone. [1] (Interestingly, after refreshing the page I get an entirely different donation request, a much smaller, red-colored bubble.)

[1] https://imgur.com/a/jX1T3P5

Meh. Who cares. Why even bring this up?

Well maybe they wouldn't have to if people weren't such cheapskates and freeloaders

They don't have to. Wikimedia has tons of money. They just want more. (As is human nature.) And the people in charge know they can get it by throwing up ads like this.

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