Disproportionate Water Quality Impacts from the Century-Old Nautanen Copper Mines, Northern Sweden

Abstract

Pollution from small historical mining sites is usually overlooked, in contrast to larger ones. Especially in the Arctic, knowledge gaps remain regarding the long-term mine waste impacts, such as metal leakage, on water quality. We study the small copper (Cu) mines of Nautanen, northern Sweden, which had been in operation for only six years when abandoned approximately 110 years ago in 1908. Measurements from field campaigns in 2017 are compared to synthesized historical measurement data from 1993 to 2014, and our results show that concentrations of Cu, Zn, and Cd on-site as well as downstream from the mining site are order(s) of magnitude higher than the local background values. This is despite the small scale of the Nautanen mining site, the short duration of operation, and the long time since closure. Considering the small amount of waste produced at Nautanen, the metal loads from Nautanen are still surprisingly high compared to the metal loads from larger mines. We argue that disproportionately large amounts of metals may be added to surface water systems from the numerous small abandoned mining sites. Such pollution loads need to be accounted for in sustainable assessments of total pollutant pressures in the relatively vulnerable Arctic environment.

Microbial Sulfate Reduction (MSR) as a Nature‐Based Solution (NBS) to Mine Drainage: Contrasting Spatiotemporal Conditions in Northern Europe

“…The measurement campaigns in the Imetjoki catchment in the spring (May) and summer (August) of 2017 revealed high surface water concentrations (15–5,000 μg/L) of Cu, Zn, and Cd at and downstream of the mining site, where the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) ranged between 1.3 and 11.6 mg/L and pH‐levels were between 3.3 and 7.1 (Fischer et al., 2020). No systematic differences in concentrations could be seen between the seasons except for DOC, which were higher in all samples (on average 30%) from the summer compared to the spring.…”

“…For example, the Industrial area (ID 8) had in the spring a pH of 3.3 and a Cu concentration of 5,000 μg/L and still showed a median MSR of 17%. An explanation could be that the local stream network has developed acid‐tolerant SRM, considering that mine drainage from the Nautanen mines has been developed during a long time over the past 110 years, reaching a condition that can be described as nearly a steady state with regard to the considerable downstream pollution transport (Fischer et al., 2020).…”

“… Map showing (a) the location of the two mining areas in northern Fennoscandia, namely (b) the Imetjoki catchment, including (c) the abandoned Nautanen copper mines and (d) the Khibiny massif with (e) the two investigated catchments Belaya and Vuonnemiok. ID 15 (reference Lina River) is not shown in the map and is located 5 km east of the Imetjoki catchment (see Fischer et al., 2020 for coordinates). …”

Mine Waste Rock: Insights for Sustainable Hydrogeochemical Management

“…The impacts of these mine wastes, even when properly managed in engineered storage facilities, can be wide-ranging and include ecological, hydrological, geotechnical, climatic, and environmental aspects pertaining to the quality of natural habitat, i.e., the atmosphere, ground-and surface-water, and soils. High-profile mine waste catastrophes are well-known by the public (e.g., tailings dam failures in Canada [7], Hungary or Brazil [8]), but deterioration of environmental quality from mining waste more often occurs gradually [9,10] and can even linger unnoticed for years or become apparent until decades after mine closure. An example thereof is acid rock drainage (ARD); the weathering of sulfidic mine waste that leads to acidic drainage with high metal concentrations [1,11] (the term acid mine drainage is increasingly substituted by acid rock drainage to indicate that acidic drainage can originate from sources other than mines).…”

Proposed Environmental Risk Management Elements in a Carpathian Valley Basin, within the Roşia Montană European Historical Mining Area

“…During the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even the modern era, the mining impact on the environment continued [9,10]. of 15 Commonly, mining activities have a negative impact on the environment in general [11,12] and on aquatic ecosystems in particular [13][14][15][16][17]. The effects of this negative impact can be manifested throughout the whole ore extraction and processing cycle [18,19].…”