(A detail from Containing Uncertainty, an installation by Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, of Smudge Studio, for Landscapes of Quarantine at Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2010.)

A disused gold mine might soon provide geothermal energy for the city of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, reports CBC.ca.

Yellowknifers have long thought about drawing geothermal heat from the abandoned mine, as former miners have reported temperatures exceeding 30 C when they were underground.

If the project goes ahead, a network of distribution pipes would have to be built to deliver heat from the mine to various downtown buildings.

Oil would still be used under the proposed geothermal plan, but would make up five per cent of the energy used. Still, Yellowknife could save 7.6 million litres of oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 17,000 tonnes a year under the proposed plan.

To quickly change to a related or unrelated subject, we've often wondered if you can excavate a system of underground tunnels wherein differentials in atmospheric pressure (or some other laws of physics unknown to us) create air movements at speeds fast and consistent enough to produce appreciable wind energy.

If you perforate a mountain (or an entire mountain range) that's buffeted by strong winds all the time from all sides and then populate it with burrowing giant helium balloons to keep the air moving when the Chinook or Katabic winds are at a standstill, how many homes can be powered? The entire downtown area or just the reclusive hamlet of a rogue Swiss tunnel digger?

Wind power and the cost-benefit headaches of such a multi-billion-dollar project aside, can you perforate a mountain simply to hum a tune, to turn it into a gigantic wind organ playing a melancholic song from deep geologic time? You won't be singing it to the mountain; the mountain will instead, to you.