Environmental impacts from mining at Taojiang Mn ore deposit, central Hunan, China

The Taojiang Mn ore deposit was exploited in the early 1960s, and waste rocks were developed since then. Because the Mn ores were hosted within the metal-enriched black shales （Peng et al., 2004）, the continuous mining has led to the exposure of an immense quality of black shales, which might cause serious impacts on environments. The present study deals with this environmental issue with samples from the waste rocks, and from the surrounding soils and surface water. The mineralogy of the waste rock was studied using EMPA, then a large number of elements in all waste rock, soil, and water samples were analyzed at a wide range of concentrations with high accuracy using an Elan6000 ICP-MS machine at Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The waste rock is composed mostly of black shales, with minor Mn carbonates. Both black shales and Mn carbonates of the waste rock contain many sulfide minerals, mainly pyrite, with minor galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, and others. The waste rocks are enriched in many metals including Sc, V, Cr, Co, Ni, Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn, Pb, Th, U, Mo, Sb, Sn, Tl, and others, and the metals are mostly hosted within the sulfides. Weathering of waste rocks might cause emission of the following metals： V, Cd, Ni, Th, U, Mo, Sb, Tl, Sc, Cr, Cu, Zn, Sn, and minor Co, and Pb. The surrounding soils are highly enriched in Cr, Co, Cu, Zn, Mn, Mo, Cd, Tl, and Pb, with the enrichment factors of 2.67.3.8, 7.26, 7.27, 8.2, 5.7, 13, and 5.4, respectively. The element ratios （Rb/Cs, Fe/Mn, Nb/Zr, Hf/Zr, and Ba/Sr） and REE distribution patterns of the soils are similar to those of the waste rocks and bedrocks.

Environmental impacts from mining at Taojiang Mn ore deposit, central Hunan, China