(logo whooshes) - [Stan] Butte's famed Berkeley Pit is a vast remnant of Montana's mining history.

Now, researchers have found critical minerals in the muck and hope the pit's bounty can once again build the future.

- Computers, batteries from this mud in this lake of toxic water.

It could change the world, truly.

- Plus 30 years of wolf research in Yellowstone National Park could soon take a leap forward, thanks to new troves of sound data and the AI tools to process it.

From the campuses of Montana State University Bozeman and the University of Montana Missoula, you're watching "IMPACT," and those stories are straight ahead.

Stay with us.

- [Announcer] Major funding for "IMPACT" comes from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

Funding also comes from viewers like you who are Friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

"IMPACT" is an editorially independent production of Montana PBS Reports.

Coverage decisions are made by our team of Montana-based journalists.

For feedback, questions, or ideas, email us, impact@montanapbs.org.

- Hello, and welcome to "IMPACT" from Montana PBS Reports.

I'm Stan Parker.

Well, you may have heard about critical minerals or rare earth elements in the news recently, and that's because these terms are referring to many of the basic raw materials that are needed for almost every industry.

The prosperity and security of nations depends on them in a lot of ways, and that's why there's growing concern that the U.S.

has become dependent on other countries for many of these materials.

Montana PBS's Sam Wilson is here and has been looking into this issue.

Sam, to get a better idea of what we're talking about here, what kinds of things are critical minerals used in?

- Well, nearly everything.

If it has a computer chip in it, you can bet that it needs critical minerals to function.

Renewable energy relies on critical minerals, as well as a lot of technology vital for national security.

And the only way to get this stuff is by digging it out of the ground.

Mining has become really challenging in the United States due in large part to the legacy of places like the Berkeley Pit in Butte.

And people are asking if these old toxic mines could actually be a part of the solution to the critical mineral question.

So I went to the Berkeley Pit to see for myself if yesterday's trash could be the treasures of tomorrow.

(logo whooshing) - Well, welcome to the Berkeley Pit, a very large open pit mine here in Butte, Montana.

We closed in 1982.

They turned the water pumps off and it began filling.

Everything in town drains to the Berkeley Pit.

So everyone knows the 10,000 miles of tunnels under Butte, and as that water has just slowly percolated through and keeps dissolving out, and with that high-acidic water, it just keeps bringing everything in here and concentrating everything.

- That includes not just the toxic metals that have made the Berkeley Pit infamous, but also rare earth elements, a particular group of critical minerals that aren't actually rare, but dispersed in small amounts throughout the earth's crust.

What is rare is finding concentrations of these elements.

And here, Butte has history on its side.

Well, I think a lot of people, you know, they look at the pit and they think it's very ugly, you know?

- Yep, yep.

- Kind of as a bruise on the side of Butte almost.

You seem to appreciate it on a different level.

- Yeah, yeah, and especially with like my grandfather, you know, coming over from Europe and immigrating here and starting to work underground, and feels a part of me, right?

Like my grandmother's house was... The old foundation, you can see the Kelly Mine shaft there.

The old foundation of her house is right there, and that's where my grandmother grew up.

And then to know that it's not just an ugly pit, right?

It's something that we can potentially use for economic value as well as use that economic value to help clean up the environment around here.

- [Sam] Jackson Quarles was first hired to monitor the water quality here, but in 2022, he was given an additional assignment, search the state's mine tailings for rare earth elements.

With coworker Matthew Vitale, they've taken over 600 samples at mines across the state.

In the Berkeley Pit, they use a drone submarine capable of scooping up water and sludge from anywhere in the pit.

And when it returns to shore- (water splashing) - [Jackson] Oh, we got sludge this time, baby.

- [Sam] Samples are sent to a lab at West Virginia University, where results have been promising.

- Truly, we've encountered almost the entirety of the full suite of rare earth elements in the pit.

Cesium, lanthanum, gallium, neodymium.

A whole bunch of other ones I can't pronounce.

And we'll just send it off and we'll see what percentage is in here, if it truly again has all of them.

Or maybe we hit a hotspot that has high gallium or something along those lines.

- [Sam] I mean, it's amazing.

Like we, we have this sludge here, and we're talking about the most high-tech technology there is out there.

- Potentially, yeah.

You know, defense systems, computers, batteries from this mud in this lake of toxic water in Butte, Montana.

And it could be everywhere.

It could change the world, truly.

- [Sam] Despite all the optimism, that Ziploc bag of sludge has a long, expensive, and uncertain road ahead before it changes the world.

- Rare earth elements are 14 metals, and those are all critical minerals, but not all critical minerals are rare earth elements.

And it really depends on who is defining the critical mineral, because different countries have different lists.

And the two things that make a mineral critical are it has to be necessary to society.

Society cannot do without circuit boards and semiconductors, for example, nowadays.

200 years ago, we certainly could.

Now we cannot.

We need that for society.

And that also lumps in special defense applications as well.

The other aspect is scarcity or risk to the supply.

- [Sam] Butte made a name for itself by providing another critical mineral for a different era.

The dawn of electricity demanded vast quantities of copper, and much of it came from what would become known as the Richest Hill.

The results of this are well-documented, corporate greed, generational pollution, and the Berkeley Pit swallowing the city neighborhood by neighborhood.

It also provided the raw materials that helped the United States cement its position as a global superpower.

But American manufacturing employment would peak in the late '70s, and soon after, the Anaconda Copper Smelter closed down, followed by the closure of the Berkeley Pit, due in part to crashing copper prices.

- So you saw the U.S.

kind of pulling away from domestic supply, and China kind of looked at this and said, well, we want to develop our industry.

They saw an opportunity to not just supply this raw material and perhaps sell it overseas, but also to supply this raw material that could supply more value-added industries.

So I'm going to use that to create a semiconductor foundry, and then I'm gonna use those semiconductors and put them into components.

And then the only American that's involved in that supply chain is the guy at Walmart selling you the electronic device.

There is definitely a problem with unregulated mineral extraction in any industry in general.

And Butte is a good example of that.

But what we need to do is understand that with our supply chain, if we're allowing these raw materials instead to come in overseas, we're just shifting the environmental and human costs to some other kids, to some other populations and people.

- [Sam] Although mining in Butte is not what it once was, it's far from over.

For one thing, copper is still mined right next door to the Berkeley Pit over in the Continental Pit.

(rocks thudding) However, the Berkeley Pit has ore that's far more sulfuric, which is responsible for the highly acidic water at the root of Butte's environmental problems, as well as the rare earth elements that could give the pit a new life.

As a part of the Superfund cleanup effort, Montana Resources began treating the water from the Berkeley in 2019 by lowering its acidity in huge tanks, forcing toxic metals to drop to the bottom.

To see if this process could also be used to specifically separate rare earth elements, Montana Resources temporarily tweaked the chemistry of its treatment plant, increasing the concentration of rare earths by a thousand times in these black bags.

However, to get usable rare earth elements, the company would need to invest in an additional extraction plant.

And they say the numbers aren't adding up.

- Here's the interesting thing though.

If you take how much water we pump and treat out of the Berkeley Pit, we could make about 24 metric tons a year of mixed rare earth oxide.

A couple years ago I ran, just based on the spot price of rare earths, I ran how much that was, the value of that.

It was $980,000.

There's no money in rare earths.

There's certain entities out there that keep the price of rare earths low so that private sector like us, there's nothing here for us.

We can't build that solvent extraction plant based on a gross return of something less than a million dollars.

We'd never pay it off.

- What does it take then to get these materials that aren't worth your while into the technology that everybody needs?

- Well, what my vision is here, the United States needs to play the same game that other countries are playing to manipulate the market.

And that is you gotta invest in our industries.

- [Sam] But even if Montana Resources is able to finance a new plant, the rare earths in the Berkeley Pit would be competing in a global market.

China has a near monopoly on refining these elements and drives down the prices to below what American producers can bear.

To see how this sort of market manipulation tips the scale against Montana industry, one need look no further than the Beartooth Mountains.

That's where Sibanye Stillwater mainly mines two critical minerals, palladium and platinum, which are largely used to cut auto emissions.

They also refine and recycle the materials at their smelter in Columbus.

- When you look at those on the critical minerals list and what you look at, what jurisdiction it comes from, it is really rare to be producing something here in the U.S.

all the way through the refining stage.

In 2022, the market started out very solid and sound.

Palladium was up in the $1,800 to $2,000 an ounce, and then about the same time of the Ukraine invasion, palladium started to drop, and it just started to fall, and it fell down to $1,500 an ounce.

Then it went down to $1,400 and $1,300, and then when palladium kept going down to $1,000 an ounce and seemed to stay there, then, you know, we really got concerned.

- [Sam] As the price of palladium fell, Russian imports into the United States increased, undercutting Sibanye Stillwater.

To make up for the shortfall, the company cut 640 jobs in late 2024, which was about 20% of all wages in Sweet Grass and Stillwater Counties.

Sibanye Stillwater later petitioned the International Trade Commission to investigate dumping by Russia.

- So there's a good question there is that, did we have, you know, Russia funding its aggression against Ukraine and others by selling off its platinum and palladium, which it has great deposits as well.

At the same time dropping that market.

Anytime you flood a market with supply, you're gonna drop the price.

And at the expense of the American miner in Montana.

There's a lot, you know, hundreds of employees, really good paying jobs, in some cases six-figure jobs, in Stillwater, Sweet Grass Counties, Montana, became unemployed as a result of that.

- [Sam] That caught the attention of all four members of Montana's Congressional Delegation.

They sent a letter to President Trump asking for an immediate 50% tariff on Russian palladium, calling it a matter of national security.

And tariffs are just one tool.

There's also direct government spending.

In July, the Department of Defense took the unprecedented step of investing $400 million in the U.S.

company that operates the Mountain Pass Mine in California and a new magnet factory in Texas.

Back in the lab in Butte, rare earths from Mountain Pass are used as a benchmark and a reminder of the risks and rewards of critical minerals.

- So the Mountain Pass Mine is the only rare earth mine in the United States right now, and it's on the border of California and Nevada.

And they are truly the only known mineable deposit of rare earth elements in the United States.

And to even know how much they struggle with actually being able to excavate, process, get everything going, and how much extra money is being funded into that project just to keep them going, makes it feel like what we're doing is that much more important.

Because if we can find something that's ready to go and we don't need to put that huge investment in just to stay afloat, that would be a miracle.

- [Sam] For "IMPACT," I'm Sam Wilson.

- The timeline for supporting critical mineral production in Montana relies largely on the political pendulum.

Mining and manufacturing industries say in order to catch up to countries like China, they need longer range planning from national leadership, which is in some ways a bigger hurdle than the science.

And as advances in artificial intelligence continue to shape our world, scientists in Yellowstone National Park are using the technology to study wolves.

It allows them to do it in less invasive ways that don't require capturing or tranquilizing them.

Montana PBS's Matt Standal spent several days in Yellowstone watching and listening to wolves and also checking out this new technology.

Matt, what did you learn when you were out there?

- Well, Stan, it's incredible to see these animals, of course, from a distance.

I watched wolves steal meat from a grizzly bear and go feed their pups.

Didn't hear much howling because of course that happens at night.

But there is a Montana company behind this new technology the park is listening to wolves with 24/7, and it's headquartered in the Paradise Valley.

What they've created could radically change how everyday Montanans interact with the wilderness.

(logo whooshes) - [Jeremy] 6:53, the wolves that are across the river are howling.

- [Matt] Just off the park road in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, wolves from the Junction Butte pack have made a kill.

- You guys go ahead.

Feel free to take a look through there.

That's the Junction Butte pack.

- [Matt] It's early morning in the end of August, the time when wolves increasingly go after bison.

Wolf technician Jeremy SunderRaj is on the scene watching the pack feed.

- So what we're trying to do here is just kind of count how many there are, record their behavior.

If we can, see like what the carcass is.

This is almost certainly a kill just based on how they're behaving around it.

It seems like we just missed it by a few minutes here.

- [Matt] SunderRaj is 29 years old and hopes to start work on his doctorate in biology at the University of Montana.

He's been a watcher of wolves since his family visited Yellowstone when he was just a boy.

- And if we're quiet, we can actually maybe hear them howling.

- [Matt] Lately, he's turned his attention to listening to them.

(wolves howling) Known for their landmark 30-year wolf study, Yellowstone's biologists have counted and tagged and tracked wolves since they were reintroduced here in 1995.

It was a controversial and politically charged move.

(airplane engine rumbling) Now, they use airplanes to spot them, helicopters to track them, and dart guns to tag them so they can be fitted with radio and GPS collars.

And with advances in artificial intelligence, there's a new way to study wolves using sound.

- Not only can we hear them here and record their howling 24/7, 365 days a year, but we often can link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing.

What is the cause and effect of howling?

Then we can look at data from GPS collars with them moving around the landscape.

How do they move in response to vocalizations?

- [Matt] Dan Stahler is the senior wildlife biologist for Yellowstone National Park, a job that includes plenty of legwork, like replacing the batteries and gathering the data from this sound recorder hidden in a tree near park headquarters.

- One more, Jeremy.

- Yellowstone's nine wolf packs are spread across the park, with the majority located in the northern range.

More than 100 wolves live in these packs, and Stahler's team has been recording their barks, yips, and howls for the past year.

- That's another goal of ours is can we detect unique pack signatures and use that?

- [Matt] He says they've collected over 7,000 wolf sounds and have been able to identify the acoustic signatures of several wolf packs in the park.

(helicopter blades thumping) In the future, Stahler thinks this bioacoustic work could partially replace the hazardous duty of capturing and collaring wolves.

- So what I could envision down the road a decade from now is that we may not have to collar certain packs or put collars out in certain areas of the park.

And then with new cutting-edge AI tools, we hope, we're not sure yet, but we hope we can answer really interesting questions about what are wolves actually saying, or can we count wolves?

Can we identify unique individuals?

- [Matt] Here in Montana's Tom Miner Basin, just a few miles up the road from Yellowstone, there's a team of researchers working on these cutting-edge new tools, combining video cameras, sound recorders, and artificial intelligence in one device.

- Yeah, we're just gonna go to the back of this valley.

There's a group of trees back here that's kind of a special spot.

- [Matt] Cody Goldhahn is a fifth-generation Montana rancher who helped invent what's called the GrizCam.

- This is where we're gonna set up the GrizCam.

Get a lot of animals through here.

It's super easy.

So we're just gonna put it on this stake.

It's just a one-step process to deploy it.

We can actually log into it with any phone or computer.

And then it fires this thing up and goes ahead and starts recording us.

(laughs) And then it'll do its test run, and then it's gonna wait for the next wild thing to walk by.

We've had grizzly bears come through and bite it.

We've had black bears pull this out and take it off and stash it somewhere else.

So we couldn't ask for a better spot with testing here.

- [Matt] That's where linguistics researcher Dr.

Jeff Reed comes in.

Reed had been experimenting with AI to study wolves near his home in the Paradise Valley.

He agreed to lend his technical expertise to the project.

- This is a wolf chorus howl, and we're using AI from Google to see if we can count the number of wolves in a chorus howl.

So this is a group of wolves.

It's like you walking into a bar and all the people are talking, and you can pick out a particular person in the room.

Wolves can pick out other wolves that they know in this cacophony of sound.

(wolves howling) - [Matt] The key to the technology is pattern recognition, according to Reed.

These colorful patterns are what's called a spectrogram of wolf howls, representing their strength and frequency over time.

Artificial intelligence, he says, can pick out the patterns and identify individual wolves much faster than any human could.

- And so by putting a tiny recorder on an individual wolf, we can study them over time and figure out how their voices might change over even time.

But how they're identifying one another on the landscape.

- This looks like a trail cam that's very technically advanced.

But you're saying that some of these sensors actually have AI functionality?

- Yes.

- And that's something not very common.

But the technology doesn't stop there.

Its inventors say the GrizCam is able to listen to human conversations from hundreds of yards away, pinpoint gunshot locations, (car engine rumbles) even identify the make and model of vehicles through sound.

- [Jeff] And I see all of the events from all of the cameras.

I can select just a particular camera and see what's going on there.

I can find keywords like skull, click on the keyword, and see the image that has the skull in it.

That's an elk skull.

- [Matt] GrizCam can send notifications to computers and cell phones when a specific animal or person is detected, making the GrizCam ideal for monitoring large landscapes like resorts, ranches, or national parks.

(car horn honks) Here in Dallas, Texas, there's a company paying for a couple dozen GrizCams to be placed in Yellowstone.

Colossal Biosciences is a genetic engineering business that has made recent news by taking DNA from extinct animals and bringing them back to life.

(pups whining) Colossal recently made news for claiming they brought back a species of wolf that died out after the Ice Age.

Next, they want to bring back something close to the woolly mammoth.

Can these controversial animals help bring attention to other threatened species worldwide?

- Colossal is a moonshot company, right?

We, in everything we do, we aim as high as possible.

And I think for me, the moonshot with bioacoustics and wolves is that can we reduce the conflict between wolves and humans?

And can we anthropomorphize the wolves and help explain that these are empathetic, emotionally complex animals?

- [Matt] Colossal is donating 25 GrizCams to Yellowstone National Park to be installed in a grid system throughout the landscape.

They're also funding more than $100,000 for research connected to Yellowstone's bioacoustic study.

- We're really hopeful then that they can collect tons and tons of data that our team can then begin to distill and train the AI to move on from just classifying wolf calls to classifying individual calls.

- [Matt] But just how much of the public domain is being recorded by this new technology?

And what about privacy concerns when it comes to sound and video recorders in wild places like Yellowstone?

Here at the University of Montana, Professor Christopher Preston studies the ethics of human interactions with the natural world and how technology can shape those interactions.

- I mean, if you ask me would I rather a wolf gets darted from a helicopter and have a radio collar put on it, or a wolf gets listened to by a 24/7 recording device, it's pretty clear to me that I'd rather have the wolf be listened to by the recording device because that's a non-invasive technique.

- [Matt] Preston says in this case, it's pretty clear that using artificial intelligence to monitor wolves in Yellowstone poses very few ethical concerns.

But take that technology and use it to monitor humans, and he's got questions.

- With a technology that clearly can gather information about the biological world and the human world at the same time, I would want to know how those distinctions are being made.

Because we do have a different sort of ethic for the human world to the one that we have for the wild world.

- You know, it strikes me that if I plan a backpacking trip out into the Rocky Mountains, Montana, and in 20 years if there's a hundred cameras out there placed by the Forest Service or the National Parks, and they can tell exactly where I went in, what I did, where I camped, if I caught a fish in a lake, and where I went out, the landscape doesn't seem so wild anymore.

- No, I share that concern.

I share the concern that you go into landscapes like that to not be part of a system where people are looking at you, where people know what you're doing.

You go there to, use the cliche, to get away from it all.

And you're certainly not getting away from it all if there is the potential for your movements to go into a database somewhere.

- So the technology can blur out faces, it can remove audio of humans talking so that they can study wildlife and not infringe upon people's privacy.

- [Matt] GrizCam's Jeff Reed says he's committed to keeping the technology in his company's devices from being used in ways he doesn't intend it to.

And that includes his promise not to sell any public data it collects.

He said other companies developing this technology might not have those safeguards, and the technology is rapidly expanding.

- This stuff is coming, whether it's in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, the world... I mourn at the fact that satellites can now get to resolution and know where I'm walking in Yellowstone.

It's over, it's gone.

The world is getting smaller.

But just because the world's getting smaller doesn't mean that that 6% of the wild world that's still there isn't there, right?

We may know a lot about it, but the big question is, do we still want it around?

- [Matt] For Dan Stahler, that big question is at the core of his research.

Just exactly how do wild creatures like wolves affect the landscape of America's first national park?

And why should humans want to watch and listen to them?

- I think big picture, we're really more interested in understanding the community ecology of Yellowstone.

So not just being laser-focused on wolves, but what does the world of wolf mean to the life of a cougar, to a grizzly bear, to the scavenger guild, to the vegetation communities, to all the diverse prey that wolves interact with here in the landscape.

So I think, you know, we're gonna keep this study going.

There'll be new emerging questions.

But the fundamental question will be, why is Yellowstone's wildlife community important to this landscape, important to Montana, and important to the world?

- [Matt] For "IMPACT," I'm Matt Standal.

- Another possible use for this technology is to help manage the relationship between ranchers and wolves.

The same researchers in this story hope they could use speaker systems powered by AI to keep wolves away from livestock and reduce conflict with people.

Well, that's all we have for you on this episode of "IMPACT."

From all of us here at Montana PBS, thank you for watching.

(mellow music) (mellow music continues) (mellow music continues) - [Announcer] Major funding for "IMPACT" comes from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

Funding also comes from viewers like you who are Friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.