“Now when people look for gold, they could find mercury with it,” he said, adding that mercury introduced into the environment from the early 20th century gold rush has sunk down as deep as bedrock and that digging might release the toxic metal. The gold was extracted while the mercury was left behind. A century ago, it was common for miners in Nome to use mercury to recover gold.

Modern miners may be putting themselves at risk by trying to recover gold from mercury-heavy sediments on the sea floor, said Ali Hamade, a state environmental public health manager. The Bering Sea port town of Nome has been a magnet this summer for gold prospectors, some of them with little experience, in a boom that state officials attribute in part to publicity from Discovery Channel’s reality TV show “Bering Sea Gold” and other mining shows set in Alaska. ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Alaska health officials, concerned about amateur miners seeking riches in a modern-day mini gold rush, plan to test prospectors in the town of Nome for mercury exposure for fear that archaic mining techniques may be inadvertently harming their bodies.

Bering sea gold dredge