JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert.

JAD: And the topic remains ...

ROBERT: Oops.

JAD: Final oops coming up. It's a double oops, I would say.

ROBERT: We start with an oops that leads to another oops that then self-negates.

JAD: It comes to us from a fellow who within the confines of this show, we will call "Oopsie" Wheeler.

SOREN: Maybe we could just start with both of you kind of introducing yourself and saying who you are and what you do. I mean, just something basic.

ANDREA STIERLE: Hi, I'm Andrea Stierle.

DONALD STIERLE: Oh, me? I'm Donald Stierle.

SOREN: This is Don and Andrea Stierle. They're chemists. They're actually a research team.

DONALD STIERLE: Here at University of Montana.

SOREN: And they met back in the '70s.

ANDREA STIERLE: Back in 1979.

SOREN: At the University of California in San Diego.

ANDREA STIERLE: We met and almost fell in love at first sight. We dated for a week, he proposed, I accepted.

DONALD STIERLE: [laughs]

SOREN: They got married.

ANDREA STIERLE: Uh-huh.

SOREN: And not long after, Don got offered a job, so they left their home in sunny California.

ANDREA STIERLE: Mind you, we lived about half a mile from the ocean.

SOREN: Nonetheless, they packed up a truck.

DONALD STIERLE: With all of our stuff.

SOREN: Including ...

ANDREA STIERLE: About 200 plants.

SOREN: And they moved to ...

DONALD STIERLE: Butte, Montana.

SOREN: Which is a different thing altogether.

DONALD STIERLE: An old mining town that barely had a tree in the city limits. I don't know if you want to know Andrea's first impression to Butte or not. [laughs]

SOREN: Sure!

ANDREA STIERLE: I actually burst into tears, and then started laughing. I think we call that hysteria. [laughs]

BARRETT GOLDING: We had a beautiful scan up on the hill over here when this wasn't operating.

SOREN: So I actually grew up in the town over from Butte in Montana. It's a town that you were afraid to go to when you're a kid, filled with abandoned buildings, depressed. And actually, if you walked through town right there, right next to the middle of town ...

BARRETT GOLDING: I don't remember exactly where it was. I remember being here in the late '70s.

SOREN: ... is this enormous, open wound on the hill like ...

BARRETT GOLDING: Oh, wow!

SOREN: ... this deep pit.

BARRETT GOLDING: Wow, this is where the pit is.

SOREN: The Berkeley pit. And the guy saying "wow" is Barrett Golding. I couldn't get back to Butte myself, so I asked Barrett to go over there and visit with a couple of engineers.

BARRETT GOLDING: So tell me who you are. Go ahead.

JOE GRIFFIN: Okay. Well, I'm Joe Griffin, Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

NICK TUCCI: And I'm Nick Tucci. I'm with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology.

SOREN: And the three of them are standing at the edge of the pit, which is kind of hard to imagine, especially the size of this thing, but when you're at the edge of the pit, and you look down in, what you actually see is ...

BARRETT GOLDING: How can you convey what we're seeing?

SOREN: ...this enormous lake. Kind of.

NICK TUCCI: Well, it's 40 billion gallons of water, which is a lot of water. It's one of the larger lakes in the United States.

JAD: Just carved into this hill?

SOREN: Yeah. The main difference though, between this lake and one that you might decide to take an afternoon dip in is that this lake is a bizarre ...

NICK TUCCI: The color of the water is red.

JAD: Eww.

BARRETT GOLDING: This kind of sickly red.

SOREN: And also ...

BARRETT GOLDING: Greens and gray and black.

SOREN: It's technicolor. It shimmers in this way that words can't describe[00:50:00.18]. And when you're standing there, you can't help but wonder.

BARRETT GOLDING: The question I really have, and I'll rephrase it after I ask it because it's not quite—is like, what the [bleep] happened here?

ANDREA STIERLE: I don't think that's gonna air. [laughs]

BARRETT GOLDING: I mean, what happened?

JOE GRIFFIN: Well, it's just, you know, the price of copper.

SOREN: In the 1920s, when we were stringing up telephone wires and electrical wires and going through world wars, a third of the copper in the US came out of this hill.

JOE GRIFFIN: You know, the long and the short of it is you wouldn't be standing here broadcasting this or recording this without copper in your wire right there.

SOREN: And in its heyday, you know, before the pit was even around, Butte was this mining boomtown. But by the 1940s, the price of copper had dropped, the company that owned all the mines in Butte wasn't doing so well, and so they figured it'd be cheaper and easier to just blow the top off the hill. But things just kept getting worse, And by 1982, right around the time when Don and Andrea were coming to town ...

ANDREA STIERLE: ... have taken over the mountains.

SOREN: ...the mines completely shut down.

ANDREA STIERLE: When they shut the pit in early 1980s ...

SOREN: But here's the thing: while they were actually mining, they'd keep all the groundwater pumped out of there so that it's dry and they can work. And when they shut the mines down, they shut off the pumps.

ANDREA STIERLE: The company turned off the pumps, I think it was Earth Day 1982.

SOREN: Yeah, on Earth Day.

ANDREA STIERLE: After that, the pit started filling up with groundwater. And it took a good 10 years to actually see a kind of a rust-colored puddle in the bottom of the pit itself.

SOREN: But it was a puddle that was growing and growing and growing. Now here's the thing about that water: the rock around the pit is filled with pyrite, and when the water hits the pyrite and the air, the three react to create sulfuric acid.

JAD: Uh-oh.

EDWIN DOBB: In turn ...

SOREN: That's Edwin Dobb.

EDWIN DOBB: Freelance writer. Have been for about 20 years.

SOREN: Who actually grew up in Butte.

EDWIN DOBB: The sulfuric acid hastens the removal of the metals from the ore itself, like gold and silver and copper.

ANDREA STIERLE: Copper, cadmium, zinc, iron sulfate, arsenic.

SOREN: And what you end up with this is toxic, acidic disaster.

ANDREA STIERLE: And it's still rising.

SOREN: In fact, you know, since we started working on this piece, Jad, it's risen, like, about a foot.

EDWIN DOBB: There was an incident, infamous incident in the mid-1990s.

SOREN: Anybody who grew up anywhere near Butte knows this story.

EDWIN DOBB: One stormy night, some 340 snow geese landed.

JOE GRIFFIN: They landed on the water.

EDWIN DOBB: Looking for shelter.

JOE GRIFFIN: And they, of course, drink some of it.

SOREN: The next day, there were 342 goose carcasses floating on the water.

EDWIN DOBB: They were all dead. And the autopsy showed lesions in the esophagus throughout the digestive system.

JAD: It sounds like the water ate their insides.

SOREN: Yeah.

SOREN: Were you struck at all upon arriving there? Did you actually kind of go visit the mine, the old mine site?

ANDREA STIERLE: No. Avoided it like the plague. We were two staunch environmentalists, and the idea of living in a mining town was so completely foreign.

SOREN: And when they first showed up in Butte, Don and Andrea, they were kind of struggling to fit in at the university, because they're trying to study this little microorganism.

ANDREA STIERLE: A sponge in Bermuda.

SOREN: But they're in Butte.

ANDREA STIERLE: Landlocked Butte, Montana.

SOREN: To make matters worse, when they took off for a year on sabbatical ...

ANDREA STIERLE: Our college accidentally unplugged our refrigerator, destroying all of our samples.

SOREN: Oh my God!

ANDREA STIERLE: Desperation.

DONALD STIERLE: Definitely.

ANDREA STIERLE: We had no funding. We decided we just needed to start over.

SOREN: But one day ...

ANDREA STIERLE: A scientist named Bill Chattam ...

SOREN: Came into their lab ...

ANDREA STIERLE: With a piece of wood. And on this wood, there was some green slimy stuff.

SOREN: And he said, "You won't believe this, but I found this stick with the slime on it in the pit."

ANDREA STIERLE: Floating about a foot below the surface of the water.

SOREN: Now here's the thing: I mean, that lake, this is like—this is the most deadly place you can imagine. I mean, nothing grows here. Nothing should grow here.

JAD: Nothing.

SOREN: Absolutely not.

JAD: Not even anything but nothing.

SOREN: Yes.

JAD: What's less than nothing? Maybe absolute nothing.

SOREN: Like, negative numbers of ...

JAD: Of nothingness.

SOREN: It's more than nothing. It's an active getting rid of thing.

JAD: It's a negating nothingness.

SOREN: You know how there's love and hate? This is not a lack of love. This is hate.

JAD: [laughs] Okay.

SOREN: But they got together with some colleagues. They looked at the slime, and they realized against all odds, the stuff was alive.

ANDREA STIERLE: Life in acid mine waste.

SOREN: Life that no one had ever studied before.

ANDREA STIERLE: It really is what started everything we've been doing now, gosh, for the last 15 years.

SOREN: And so far ...

DONALD STIERLE: We've had virtually hundreds of compounds, organisms that were growing.

SOREN: Organisms that make molecules that can fight viruses.

DONALD STIERLE: Several turned out to be good in our anti-cancer screens.

JAD: They fight cancer? Really?

SOREN: Yeah.

ANDREA STIERLE: So we have Berkelic acid and Berkeleyamides and the Berkeleyacetals.

SOREN: They've now published tons of papers. I mean, their work has just taken off.

DONALD STIERLE: So it's been pretty exciting research.

SOREN: But then they told me this story that totally took them by surprise. It was about a year after they'd first started looking at the pit water.

ANDREA STIERLE: We found this sort of a sticky, opaque, thick, gooey, black organism.

SOREN: Then they noticed that weirdly, if you put this little guy into a thing of the water from the pit ...

ANDREA STIERLE: It actually absorbs the metals in pit water.

JAD: What does that mean? Like, they're taking the metals out of the water?

SOREN: They become a little metal sponge, yeah.

JAD: So they're cleaning the water is what you're saying?

SOREN: Yeah. And there's lots of people that work with microorganisms to try to clean up metal-laden water, but usually these things take in maybe like, I don't know 10, 15 percent of the metals.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

SOREN: This little guy?

ANDREA STIERLE: Will actually absorb between 85 and 95 percent.

JAD: Whoa!

SOREN: They got really curious about it, and they started trying to figure out where it had ever been seen before.

ANDREA STIERLE: We had it identified.

SOREN: And they eventually discovered ...

ANDREA STIERLE: That the only place this yeast had ever been found was ...

JAD: Where?

DONALD STIERLE: Well ...

ANDREA STIERLE: In the rectal swabs of geese.

JAD: [gasps] You mean like the snow geese that landed on the water?

SOREN: Yeah. The geese left a little—a little something behind.

JAD: Wow.

SOREN: A present.

JAD: Soren Wheeler. More information at Radiolab.org.

[DONALD STIERLE: My name is Don Stierle, and Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, and Soren Wheeler.]

[ANDREA STIERLE: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Lulu Miller, Michael Rayfield, Brenna Farrell, Pat Walters ...]

[DONALD STIERLE: And the one and only Tim Howard. With help from Sharon Shaddick, Raymond Tugicar, Nicole Curry and Sam Albright. Special thanks to Barrett Golding, Phil Hubor and the whole Hubor family. And Aaron Sands. There you go. I hope I haven't made too many mistakes.]

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