Acid mine drainage biogeochemistry at Iron Mountain, California.

ABSTRACT: The Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, Shasta County, California, USA provides an excellent opportunity to study the chemical and biological controls on acid mine drainage (AMD) generation in situ, and to identify key factors controlling solution chemistry. Here we integrate four years of field-based geochemical data with 16S rRNA gene clone libraries and rRNA probe-based studies of microbial population structure, cultivation-based metabolic experiments, arsenopyrite surface colonization experiments, and results of intermediate sulfur species kinetics experiments to describe the Richmond Mine AMD system. Extremely acidic effluent (pH between 0.5 and 0.9) resulting from oxidation of approximately 1 × 10⁵ to 2 × 10⁵ moles pyrite/day contains up to 24 g/1 Fe, several

SUBMITTER: Druschel GK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1475782 | biostudies-literature | 2004

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature