“It’s rust,” said Matt Herod, a geoscientist who has studied Red Creek, one of two “rusty” waterways along the Dempster Highway. Animals have been seen to avoid Red Creek, and the rocks along its path are dyed a deep reddish hue by the high-water mark of the contaminated creek. And Red Creek has presumably been this way since woolly mammoths walked the area. But arguably the most famous example is Rio Tinto (Red River), a red river in southwestern Spain that has hosted mining activity for at least 5,000 years. There have been no biological surveys of the Yukon’s Red Creek.

Source: National Post September 19, 2016 16:18 UTC