With the discovery of the New World, tales of a resplendent, gilded kingdom, El Dorado, spurred legions of adventurers to set sail. In their sometimes suicidal pursuit of gold, however, Spain's otherwise tough conquistadors would have never considered smashing through a glacier to get to the precious metal.

That's exactly what Canada's Barrick Gold intends to do, nearly 4,800 meters above sea level on the border of Argentina and Chile. Called Pascua Lama, the company's US$1.50 billion gold mine is a colossal engineering task. To get to a 17.5 million-ounce lode of buried gold, the company must remove 10 square hectares of solid ice spread across three glaciers. Using hydraulic-powered machinery, engineers will chisel away at a 33-foot deep glacial wall and then haul away the giant ice cubes in cooled trucks to an adjacent glacier, where they'll be dumped and allowed to fuse back to the ice mass. To refreeze cubes cut away to make room for the mine, snow fences at the glacier's perimeter will hold down seasonal snow pack.

Barrick claims only 1% of the glacier's surface area will be destroyed and insists that the procedure is barely more intrusive than what Mother Nature does to the glaciers already. "Glaciers may be millennial in age, but they haven't remained unchanged all that time," says Vince Borg, Barrick's vice president for communications. If successful, Barrick plans to start production in 2009 and operate the open-pit mine for 21 years.