Always the Heat

Always the Heat

Home by Douglas Page©, 2000

Sci-Tech Science is going to extremes to find anaerobic organisms able to remediate contaminated
soil. Douglas Page profiles one group of researchers who have wandered into one of the
Medical
most forbidding places on earth - the deep levels of South African gold mines - in search
of microbes called "Extremophiles", thought to be capable of surviving conditions of
Features
extreme heat and radiation.
Profiles
The researchers get no special treatment. Ivy League credentials mean nothing here. Dressed in company-
Marriage Peril supplied orange cotton coveralls, knee-high gum boots and hard hats, they join the miners - and the
tension - collecting on the surface, near the 2 Shaft entrance, waiting for the cages. Here they are issued a
charged battery pack and headlamp, the only light they will see in most areas of the mine.
Bio
The vertical shaft is a concrete-lined silo that disappears below, into the darkness. The cages - surprisingly
clean steel boxes not much larger than freight elevators - carry as many as 150 miners at a time. They are
most crowded during shift changes. "Sweaty bodies jam in tightly, like a rock concert," says postdoctoral
microbiologist Duane Moser, leader of the team of Princeton University researchers entering the deep levels
of South Africa's East Driefontein gold mine.

Moser and his team aren't sifting for nuggets of gold, they're sampling the depths for microbes that might
manage to survive metal-rich environments of high temperature, pressure, pH, salinity and radioactivity -
creatures potentially useful for soil remediation. Since anaerobic microbes are known to exist elsewhere,
project leader T.C. Onstott, of Princeton's Geosciences Department, suspected certain mines might yield
such life-forms - called "Extremophiles". Onstott arranged access to the South African mines ("an
unprecedented and hard-won courtesy"), then enlisted Moser to organize the field/analytical end of a
project to see what might be living in the Transvaal's 'carbon leader', a highly mineralized, organic-rich vein
that contains concentrations of uranium and the world's richest gold deposits, where the rock temperatures
range to 60 degC. With Moser in South Africa is Joost Hoek, a graduate student in geology at the University
of Pennsylvania. The study also involves the Kloof, Beatrix and West Driefontein mines.

Moser became involved in the project by answering Onstott's ad in the American Society for Microbiology
News, calling for someone with expertise in geology (his undergraduate major at the University of
Wisconsin), microbiology and molecular biology. It helped that one of Moser's passions is caving ("I
included a photo of me in a cave in Kentucky showing only my muddy boots sticking out of a very small
hole."). While earning a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences, he worked coordinating a study of deepwater Great
Lakes sediments, mostly studying microbial ecology. He got the interview.

NOT AN ENVIRONMENT FOR 'SISSIES'

"The miners file in and pack ever tighter," says Moser, who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and always
loved the outdoors, seeking adventure whenever he could find it; you don't have far to look in the mines.
"Soon, your arms are pinned against your sides." There is yelling and horse-play - perhaps to bleed off
anxiety. The miners speak a mixture of languages - Fanakalo, Zulu, Sotho, Afrikaans and English, but they
share a common apprehension. This is not an environment for "sissies".

A klaxon announces the inevitable, then, like prison bars, the steel doors slam closed loudly and the gage
begins its descent. "In a few seconds all is blackness and invariably one or more of the miners turns on
their lamp," Moser says. The cage picks up speed, accelerating to 65 kph, slipping smoothly along the rails
that guide its E-Ticket cable-drop to the well-lighted dock at the bottom, 1,800 m below the surface -
deeper than four Sears Towers. A complex set of weights moves opposite the cages.

"I was amazed the first time I saw the cages and winders," he says. "They are remarkable examples of
engineering and the scale is as massive as a suspension bridge. The mines are proud of them and their
safety record." Driefontein has never had a major cage accident. Those who ride them for a living find them
safer than driving a car.

Air pressure change can be a concern the first 1,000 m, due to rapid decent. "This is all in a day's work, as

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Always the Heat

it would be for commercial divers," Moser says. "The miners know how to deal with it. If you have a cold
and thus might have trouble clearing [your ears], you are strongly discouraged from going into the mine at
all."

As the cage comes to a stop, cable-stretch causes it to bounce like a bungee-cord, sometimes 0.5 m or
more, says Moser. "The trip takes about 4 minutes." These may be the world's fastest "winders". (Elevator
is not part of mining vernacular.)

The mine goes much deeper, but limitations in cable-winding technology restrict the depth of each shaft.
After a length of about 2 km, the weight of the cable itself becomes so great its weight-bearing capacity is
reduced to the impractical.

Nothing is mined here, at the bottom of 2 Shaft; 22 Level is merely a junction to a second, sub-vertical,
cage, which descends to 50 Level, 3.5 km below the surface. In some mines, when the price of gold is
right, a tertiary shaft waits in the profound depths at 50 Level to plumb the Transvaal even deeper.

All of the Driefontein vertical shafts intersect Transvaal Malmani Supergroup dolomites on their way to the
gold-bearing strata below. These dolomites are actually quite wet, comprising massive aquifers filled with
millions of liters of pure water. In order to prevent disastrous flooding, the vertical shafts are cemented
aggressively during construction.

Below the dolomites, the mines become arid, although there are exceptions. In one incident, a water
intersection was hit about midway through a 3.5 km crosscut connecting 5 and 4 Shafts at 3.3 km down.
The shaft is now used only for emergency escape purposes. "Emergency escape routes are well-planned
and take full advantage of cross connections between shafts and even other mines," Moser says. "It is said
that someone can travel all the way across the West Rand - 100 km - totally underground."

ALWAYS THE HEAT

"The sub-vertical cage seems to descend faster than the vertical cage," says Moser. "The darkness,
although complete for the whole trip, is somehow inkier in these depths. And always the heat builds and
builds as one goes deeper. You start to sweat. The air is heavy. Breathing is labored."

Finally, the scientists reach the level they intend to sample. "The heat is now quite noticeable," Moser says,
with aplomb. "Men are sweating profusely already and the mine is as well ventilated as it is going to be at
the shaft." The working faces tend to be some distance from the shafts, however. The carbon leader itself is
in a very tight band that tilts away from the shaft like the upper arm of a "K", rising at a 20 - 30 degree
angle; thus the deeper levels have shorter walks. Even so, at 46 Level and 48 Level, where the team did
most of its work, the hiking distance is 2 to 3 km, a distance over which the team must hand carry its own
water supply and gear (hammers, chisels, collection bottles, coolers, and scientific monitoring equipment) -
with the realization that the gear will be considerably heavier on the way out when filled with rock and
water samples.

Not far into 46 Level the team encounters two huge wooden doors, used to control airflow. "Air is life in
these mines and heat and radon build-ups are threats taken seriously by the mining companies," Moser
says. "There are legal standards that they try hard to meet. The virgin rock temperature at these depths
vary from 48 to 60 degC. These are lethal temperatures for man. All who work in the mines must be
certified as heat-tolerant before they go down."

The doors are used to meter airflow to keep the passages livable. Once beyond the double doors the
temperature changes dramatically, due to air returning from deeper levels. "An involuntary heat shiver runs
through you when you walk into the hot wind," Moser said. Relief is not far away, however. Spot-chillers
are installed every few hundred meters throughout the passages, "large, noisy radiators" that transfer the
air heat to water, something like "swamp coolers", that blow a stream of cool, wet air down the tunnels.

Plodding onward, he says, with the heat and perspiration sapping your strength, an inconceivable thirst
overwhelms you. "Dehydration is a serious threat. Earlier, I carried 2 liters of water and invariably, no
matter how I tried to conserve, would run out. Once on the surface, I was so wiped out I had to take a nap,
which often amounted to collapsing for several hours. By doubling this to 4 liters and then consuming a
salty bag of potato chips and swilling more liters of water on the surface, I found such effects to be largely
alleviated. Even with consuming 4 liters, one emerges with a raging thirst."

The mine is cooled by air and recycled service water. "We have found there are a few highly stressed but
viable organisms, all mesophilic (bacteria which grow best at temperatures of 20-45 degC), limping along in
the service water," Moser says. "This has turned out to be valuable, as the water invariably contains the
lipid biomarker signature of oxidatively stressed bacteria (epoxides). These compounds can be detected at
low concentrations and have served as a reliable chemical tracer from service water contamination."

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Always the Heat

At the working face, the team takes samples of water dripping from boreholes, although the major focus of
their work is in the stopes - crawl-spaces sliced from the carbon leader so squat you can't stand up in
them. "The carbon leader and other reefs (veins) extend outward in an extensive tilted horizontal plane,"
Moser says, "meaning all of the mining is done on a considerable slope." Here they obtained the first
carbon leader samples.

"This is almost pure, black carbon at a depth of roughly 2.3 km," he says. Mine geologists maintain this
high-carbon leader is the richest gold ore in the world. Whereas the mine yields typical values of 10 to 12 g/
ton, this high-carbon leader grades out at 5,000 g/ton.

At this level, Moser says, there were also many great accumulations of apparent elemental sulfur covering
the walls. "The sulfur was always associated with small cracks and fissures in the walls and was often dry
and feathery in appearance. When the sulfur was associated with water, the pH was always in the 3 to 4
range."

THE MAZES OF HELL

A few days later, on a subsequent trip to depth at West Driefontein, Moser took samples at a location
where water had been intersected 2 weeks earlier at 38 Level in 6 Shaft, 2.7 km down. To get to this
tunnel, Moser had to follow the most hellish of mazes, requiring descent down two shafts, then riding a
personnel carrier 3 km to a tertiary shaft, taking it to the bottom, then walking another 2.5 km before
entering a fissure nearly 12 km from sunlight. "The 'carrier' is a little version of the cage on wheels," Moser
says. "It is very low and guys clamber in and sit hunched over on metal benches. The ride is not
comfortable, but it sure beats walking."

As if that weren't daunting enough, the region is seismically active. "We were hit with some pretty serious
seismicity while in West Drie," Moser says. "The first 'bump', centered somewhere in Western Deep Levels
some 8 km distant, hit while we were in the stopes at 6 Shaft. You could hear and feel it approaching for a
spookish period of time and then move on. It was like it moved right through you. The sound, more felt
than heard, is like a low rumble mixed with elements of opening a peanut butter jar in a toilet."

Faith in its fullest dimension follows miners underground, but when the ground itself moves, all human
confidence is suspended. The riveting realization that kilometers of rock rest overhead cannot be driven
from the mind, as it must be at most times at depth. There is no escape. The rumble is so loud it
transcends the mine's ambient din. The shaker, a Richter 4.1, "shook us up a bit," says Moser. "The drillers
all turned off their machines and there was a second or so of eerie silence, then the bump pushed through.
The miners could actually feel the rock contract as the bump approached. They all looked at one another
and all was silent for another 5 minutes after the shock. Then they all just went back to work."

On the way out, a second shaker hit with a "massive bang", centered in the 6 Shaft pillar where they were
waiting for the second lift. Amazingly, very little damage was done to the

mine, he said, although lots of debris rained down from the roof during both. On the way out, the team
could see places where rock-burst had taken a section of roof or wall out, but always the heavy mesh
retainers, strung for just such events, held the rock back.

West Driefontein, a, shallower, older mine, was largely ruled out for further studies based on indications of
service water contamination, borne out by the epoxide data. "The waters that were studied came from
areas that were based on distances from other mining activity, and chemical signatures thought to be pure
and pristine," says Moser. "This was important because it demonstrated that we could recognize service
water with quick and simple techniques in the field so as to avoid wasting time underground chasing
unproductive samples."

The majority of carbon leader samples were taken in East Driefontein 5 Shaft 46/48 Levels, collected with
ever-improving care and technique. "The sampling in East Driefontein represented a very different
situation," Moser says. "No levels are present over the stope here, as only the carbon leader is being
mined. It's a new mine. With each blast virgin rock is exposed. No other mining is conducted for at least 4
km in any direction."

The sampling method settled on in the end was to collect a large freshly blasted hand sample with carbon
leader cutting across it, to which a variety of chemical (e.g. rhodamine) and particulate (e.g. bacteria-sized
flourescent microbeads) were applied. The sample was then blasted in situ with an actual mining hose to
simulate treatment it would receive in the mining process. The samples, weighing as much as 15 kg, along
with bulk quartzite controls, were then transported to the surface for processing.

"At the surface, the sample was first place in an anaerobic chamber which we set up in our field

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Always the Heat

laboratory," Moser says, "and the outer surfaces were carefully pared away with the powerful jaws of our
hydraulic rock splitter, a device made with hardened steel and powered by a 20 t jack." Samples from the
outer layers and the resulting putatively pristine internal nugget were taken for tracer analysis and a suite
of other studies. "A portion was ground to make a slurry, or chunks were added directly to bacteriological
growth media for enrichment experiments," he says. "Subsamples were likewise archived frozen or fixed for
electron and light microscopy, DNA extraction, lipid biomarker analysis, mercury porosimetry and geological
analysis. Great care was taken to be certain that every surface that touched the precious rock sample had
been either bleach sterilized or autoclaved."

In later experiments, the mine provided the team a coring team, Moser says. In this way, tracers were
added directly to the drilling water and the miners core directly into the carbon leader from the sidewall.
Samples thus collected were then processed using sterile tools.

Thus far in the bedrock ovens, Moser has obtained quality samples that have never before been available to
science. "All sorts of obstacles had to be surmounted," he says, "but in the end we have a freezer full of
great stuff, a growing spreadsheet of data and isolates that very well may be life from the deep
subsurface."

Early indications are a new form of the bacterium, Thermus sp., isolated from groundwater samples, may
be anaerobic, radiation-resistant, and appears, at least in the mine, to interact with iron, chromium, cobalt,
and uranium - elements common in contaminated soils. -end-

This article appeared in Science Spectra (No. 19, 2000).

Suggested Reading:

Chivian D., Brodie E. L., et al., "Environmental Genomics Reveals a Single-Species Ecosystem Deep
Within Earth", Science 10 October 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5899, pp. 275 - 278.

Comments? Questions? Corrections? Assignments? douglaspage@earthlink.net

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