Spatial Distribution of Heavy Metals around the Gold Mine Ore Tailings of Hatti, Karnataka State, India

Abstract

Mining is an imperative segment of the world economy as it contributes socio-economic status of the nations. However, developing countries like India due to lack of high profile industrial techniques and equipment, eluting effluents from the industrial process may contain various hazardous substances which greatly affect the environmental and human health. The present work is aimed with the distribution of heavy metals in and around Hatti Gold Mine Ore Tailing (H-GOT). The results elicit the mine ore tailings are having high-level contaminants of heavy metal than the crop lands of Hatti (Hs), Kotha (Ks), Chikka Nagur (Cs), Tawag (Ts), Lingsugur (Ls) of Raichur District, Karnataka. It was reported that, Hatti Gold Mine ore tailings hold about 41.31±0.49 mg/kg, 2.1±0.31mg/kg, 71.96±3.26 mg/kg, 39.56±1.47 mg/kg and 73.4±2.19 mg/kg of Arsenic (As), Cadmium (Cd), Copper (Cu), Lead (Pb) and Zinc (Zn) heavy metals respectively. While the crop lands metal contamination range depends on seasonal variation. In south-west monsoon farming lands metal contamination order is Hs> Ks>Cs> Ts >Ls, and it was decreased during Post-monsoon. This is the hallmark of the fetching huge amount of toxic heavy metals from mining center to nearest crop lands. The continuous squeezing of these toxic metals could trigger the bio-magnification in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem and it may impact various metabolic disorders.

Ecological and Health Risk Assessments of an Abandoned Gold Mine (Remance, Panama): Complex Scenarios Need a Combination of Indices

“…Soil quality can be estimated by various indices [40]. A site polluted by a certain element can be assessed by the pollution index (PI) (Equation (1)), and the same, but with more than one element, can be determined by the pollution load index (PLI) [5,41] using Equation (2). PI = C soil /C background (1)…”

“…Mining activities can potentially pollute the environment, especially when tailing materials are left exposed to weather conditions, which favor the release and dispersion of pollutants to the surrounding soil, plants, water bodies and humans [1][2][3][4]. The dispersion of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) can be primarily assessed by edaphological characterization and geochemical quantification of pollutants.…”

Environmentally Degraded Mining Areas of Eastern Slovakia As a Potential Object of Geotourism

“…The article provides an information base for further research in the area of tailing ponds and more detailed analysis of the environmental loading of individual landscape elements. The mentioned analysis confirms the enormous burden of tailing ponds with deposited heavy metals in the sense of similar tailing pond research in other areas of the world [5,6,9,14,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24]30]. The analysis of the heavy metal content on both mining heaps has not been performed.…”

“…The most important contaminants are heavy metals in sediments of tailing ponds and heaps. The burden manifests itself across all components of the earth's land sphere [5][6][7][8][9][10] or within individual components: air [11], water [12][13][14][15], soil [11,12,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], and flora and fauna [15,[26][27][28]. Last but not least, the negative effect of these or similar forms is also manifested in humans [10,19,29,30].…”