A description of the environmental impacts of mining
near Butte, MT via biomonitoring.
Philip Anderson, Austin Zabel, Brendan Maddin, Melissa McCrady, and Kevin Hayes
Department of Earth and Environmental Science
Introduction

Results

In the 1880s, Butte, Montana was home to one of the richest
mineral deposits in the world. Today, the region is home of two of
the most toxic superfunds sites in America, the Anaconda Smelter
Site and the Berkeley Pit.
The goal of this analysis is to quantitatively determine the baseline
level of heavy metals accumulated adjacent to the superfund sites.
In order to sample and describe past and present air pollutant
emissions we employed biomonitoring and dendrochronological
techniques on Lodgepole Pine trees.

Figure 3. Heat Map of Bark and Needle Samples. This figure displays the log transformed metal
concentrations of the bark and needle samples as well as their grouping based upon Principle
Component Analysis.

Figure 1. The Berkeley Pit. This pit is constructed North of the city of Butte Montana, and was
created for the purpose of copper extraction. It is no longer a functioning mining site. Retrieved
from https://www.google.ca/maps/@46.0444707,-112.6526318,57858m/data=!3m1!1e3 .

Methodology
Pine needle, bark, and tree core samples were collected from the
Elk Park area North of the Berkeley Pit and West of the Anaconda
smelting site. The needles and bark were dried, weighed and
ashed in a muffle furnace. Tree cores were dated and cross
compared using the tree rings, then treated in the same manner
as the previous tree components.
The samples were digested and analyzed using Inductively
Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS).

Figure 2. Tree Core Sampling. Needles, bark, and tree cores were collected from 8 trees on two
hills within Elk Park.

.

Figure 4. Composite Core Data. This figure displays the log transformed composite tree core
concentrations for all samples prior to 1980 and post 1980. The differences between Mn, Ag,
and Cd are significant (p<0.01); Ni significant (p<0.05); via One-Way Anova and Tukey HSD test.

Discussion
Pine needles and bark samples indicate a relatively high level
of heavy metals; one needle sample exhibited over 50ppm of
Arsenic. Core samples demonstrate a significant decrease post
1980 across many of the heavy metals tested for; this may be
due to the closing of the Anaconda Smelting Site in the late
1970’s. This difference may become more pronounced with the
rerun of several samples due to unresolved drift and stability
issues with the ICP-MS. The baseline established this year will
be helpful in determining if current changes (Fall 2018) and
remediation practices being conducted on the Berkeley Pit
positively or negatively impact air quality in the region.

Figure 5. Superfund Sites and Sampling Location. Retrieved from
https://www.google.ca/maps/@46.0444707,-112.6526318,57858m/data=!3m1!1e3.

References
Speer, J. H. (2010). Fundamentals of tree ring research. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.