Consequences of Industrial Mineral Processing in the Arctic Zone of Yakutia

• Published in: IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
• Main Author: Moskvitin, S
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: IOP Publishing 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Indigirka; Arctic Basin; Yakutia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1757-899x/1079/6/062068; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/1079/6/062068; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/1079/6/062068/pdf

Abstract The Arctic zone of Yakutia is the industrially developed territory of the Republic. Processing of tin, rare earths and gold deposits for decades has led to formation of a huge mass of waste in the form of dumps and tailings. In the area tailing dumps of Batagai, Deputatskiy and Kularsky processing plants can be found nowadays, where ore tailings were dumped. In this work mineralogical compositions of mining wastes are presented, and the structure and condition of the tailings dumps at present time are studied. The impact of actually applied technologies on the environmental situation in extracting tin, gold and rare earth minerals as well as mechanisms are examined. The impact of weathering processes on the environmental safety of the region was established. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the tailings dumps pose a real ecological threat to the environment. In case of any accident, there will be consequences causing irreparable damage not only to the ecology of The Yana and Indigirka river basins, but also to the water area of the entire continental shelf of the North-East of Yakutia. Elimination of environmentally hazardous substances through industrial processing will reduce the risk of environmental threats to the territory and the entire Arctic basin.