Quantifying Erosion of Mercury-Contaminated Gold Mining Debris at Deer Creek, California
At the Deer Creek study site in Nevada County, California, the USGS Western Remote Sensing and Visualization Center (WRSVC) has utilized tripod-mounted lidar to quantify the eroded volume of mercury-contaminated sediment associated with historical gold mining from a discrete section of cutbank for three periods between 2010 and 2013. The eroded volumes were combined with laboratory analyses of mercury concentration and grain-size distribution in the sediment to estimate the amount of mercury mobilized by Deer Creek for the various periods.