Iron sulfide oxidation and the chemistry of acid generation

1988 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Sullivan ◽  
Jennifer L. Yelton ◽  
K. J. Reddy
2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 773-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. R. Hossner ◽  
J. J. Doolittle

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Pacquet ◽  
F. Weber

Around the Cigar Lake orebody, the present zoneography of alteration halos reflects several alteration episodes, some of which are anterior to and others coeval with the mineralizing events and have a regional extension. The basement retromorphism is characterized by crystallization of muscovite with a low iron and magnesium content and of trioctahedral ferromagnesian chlorites. The later regolith alteration, more obvious at the top of the basement, is marked by iron-bearing 1T kaolinite, by hematite, and by local crandallite–florencite and diaspore. In the Athabasca sandstones far from any mineralization, the diagenetic quartzification was followed by crystallization of aluminous 2M hydromuscovite, dickite, and crandallite–goyazite.In the main pod, the uraninite mineralization was dated 1341 ± 12 Ma. In the sandstones, it is surrounded by ferromagnesian chlorites with a variable sudoitic character. This proximal alteration halo grades into a more distal envelope, visible in the sandstone and in the basement, that is composed of magnesian sudoite and 3T hydromuscovite. During this mineralizing event, dravite crystallized in the form of urchin-like clusters in the basement and xenotime overgrowths, around altered zircon, and apatite formed in the sandstones.Around the main pod and in some perched orebodies, an alteration zone of vanadium-bearing ferrikaolinite and iron-bearing 3T hydromuscovite, crosscut by a later siderite, surrounds the pitchblende dated 323 ± 4 Ma. Coffinite and an aluminous hydromuscovite crystallized during a later fracture event. The aluminous hydromuscovite also appears, with a silica–carbon–uranium complex, in perched mineralizations. Kaolinization and iron-sulfide oxidation into iron hydroxides occurred in perched orebodies that were more exposed to meteoric alteration.


Pyrite ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rickard

The two basic processes concerning pyrite in the environment are the formation of pyrite, which usually involves reduction of sulfate to sulfide, and the destruction of pyrite, which usually involves oxidation of sulfide to sulfate. On an ideal planet these two processes might be exactly balanced. But pyrite is buried in sediments sometimes for hundreds of millions of years, and the sulfur in this buried pyrite is removed from the system, so the balance is disturbed. The lack of balance between sulfide oxidation and sulfate reduction powers a global dynamic cycle for sulfur. This would be complex enough if this were the whole story. However, as we have seen, both the reduction and oxidation arms of the global cycle are essentially biological—specifically microbiological—processes. This means that there is an intrinsic link between the sulfur cycle and life on Earth. In this chapter, we examine the central role that pyrite plays, and has played, in determining the surface environment of the planet. In doing so we reveal how pyrite, the humble iron sulfide mineral, is a key component of maintaining and developing life on Earth. In Chapter 4 we concluded that Mother Nature must be particularly fond of pyrite framboids: a thousand billion of these microscopic raspberry-like spheres are formed in sediments every second. If we translate this into sulfur production, some 60 million tons of sulfur is buried as pyrite in sediments each year. But this is only a fraction of the total amount of sulfide produced every year by sulfate-reducing bacteria. In 1982 the Danish geomicrobiologist Bo Barker Jørgensen discovered that as much as 90% of the sulfide produced by sulfate-reducing bacteria was rapidly reoxidized by sulfur-oxidizing microorganisms. Sulfate-reducing microorganisms actually produce about 300 million tons of sulfur each year, but about 240 million tons is reoxidized. The magnitude of the sulfide production by sulfate-reducing bacte­ria can be appreciated by comparison with the sulfur produced by volcanoes. As discussed in Chapter 5, it was previously supposed that all sulfur, and thus pyrite, had a volcanic origin. In fact volcanoes produce just 10 million tons of sulfur each year.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarka Vaclavkova ◽  
Christian Juncher Jørgensen ◽  
Ole Stig Jacobsen ◽  
Jens Aamand ◽  
Bo Elberling

1985 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. P. Evangelou ◽  
J. H. Grove ◽  
F. D. Rawlings

Author(s):  
Thao A. Nguyen

It is well known that the large deviations from stoichiometry in iron sulfide compounds, Fe1-xS (0≤x≤0.125), are accommodated by iron vacancies which order and form superstructures at low temperatures. Although the ordering of the iron vacancies has been well established, the modes of vacancy ordering, hence superstructures, as a function of composition and temperature are still the subject of much controversy. This investigation gives direct evidence from many-beam lattice images of Fe1-xS that the 4C superstructure transforms into the 3C superstructure (Fig. 1) rather than the MC phase as previously suggested. Also observed are an intrinsic stacking fault in the sulfur sublattice and two different types of vacancy-ordering antiphase boundaries. Evidence from selective area optical diffractograms suggests that these planar defects complicate the diffraction pattern greatly.


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