It should be trivial to observe drilling and excavation vessels loitering, and ore carriers leaving the site.
Not to mention that mining claims will have to be registered somewhere. (And if you don't, someone else will observe you excavating, and register their own claim on your site, and start digging alongside you. You may get a postcard and a thank-you note for the prospecting legwork you've done for your competitor.)
Mining has an incredible footprint of manpower and machinery. You can't keep it secret.
No, it won't. Remediation of these areas usually involve planting back a fraction of the biodiversity that was there before, and usually cloned from the same genetic stock, making the new plants more of a monoculture and susceptible to disease and less adaptable to environmental changes.
That's the plants.
In the meantime, all the animals were pushed out of that large area (I've never seen a small mine), and then either killed their neighbors in the (assumed) adjacent ecosystem, or were killed by them. Great.
Next you'll be telling us the remediated areas are actually better than what it was before (and in my anecdotal experience some mining companies not only say exactly this, but commission studies to prove it).
My point is that the permanent disturbance of urbanization should be much more concerning than temporary disturbances.
New pits opened within the last two decades probably .. but possibly in ways that can be dodged.
Older pits nearing the end of 50 or 70 year life spans .. unlikey.
These are often "sold" to cut out companies that have no real assets to speak of and soon go bankrupt .. leaving the former owners in the clear.
Eg:
Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, Faro Mine is now the site of one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation projects in Canada. The 25 square kilometre mine site located in south-central Yukon on traditional territory of KaskaNations was abandoned in 1998 and has since been in care and maintenance.
In 2022, we were contracted by Public Services and Procurement Canada on behalf of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to lead the team developing the remediation plan design and quality assurance support services.
It's the same with offshore rigs in marine environs being abandoned for the public purse to deal with.
In theory it shouldn't be happening and bonds should have been held in escrow, in practice many western countries (New Zealand, Australia, elsewhere .. ) are seeing projects ending with no remediation.
How many thousands of years ago was the first Rio Tinto mine, and when did they close it?
> You did have to find an example from 26 years ago.
It seems you don't know much about global mining.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
There are hundreds of thousands of examples of abandoned mines in dire need of reclaimation, btw ... in one state of one single country:
Extensive mining has occurred in Western Australia since the mid-1800s resulting in tens of thousands of abandoned mine features across the Western Australia.
There's a program to very slowly deal with as many as possible using money taxed from current and future minesites .. but this is underfunded and overwhelmed.
It's a similar story in South Africa, other African states, China, Mongolia, Russia, former USSR satellites, Canada, USofA, etc.
Dunno whether S&P (peer link) still do abandoned mine GIS data .. we did before we sold that to them.