The flooded Freiberg/Sachsen Mining District--Hydrogeochemistry, Hydrodynamics and Environmental Impacts

摘要

Mining in the Freiberg mining district began as early as 1168 AD and since then several hundreds of kilometres of galleries, shafts and mine workings where constructed to extract silver and lead ores. The Freiberg Mining district has been flooded about 30 years ago. Due to a 50 km long dewatering adit, the Rothschonberger Stollen, the mines are divided in a phreatic and a vadose zone. Furthermore, the flooded part of the mine shows a hydrodynamic stratification and the total mass load of the different water constituents impacts parts of the downstream river courses at the dewatering adit's fall out location. The publication will describe the historical development of the Freiberg mining area, the current state of the flooding process and some of the hydrogeological, hydrodynamic and geochemical investigations that where and will be conducted to understand the flooding regime. Remark: this paper just gives a short overview about the Freiberg mine water situation. A longer work about the Freiberg mining district by the authors is currently in preparation and will be published in 2006.