August 2015

Dave Craw has recently returned from Goldschmidt, the annual international geochemical meeting, which was held in Prague in late August. He presented an invited paper (co-authored by James Pope and PhD student Gemma Kerr) on arsenic attenuation at Macraes mine, in a special session on contaminant geochemistry. He also attended a field trip to the Erzgebirge, a highly productive historic mining area on the border of Czech Republic and Germany, where records of mining go back at least 800 years. One site visited that is relevant to the above Central Otago study of enhanced biodiversity at old mines is a rocky, rubbly area of collapsed underground mine workings that has been made in to a local reserve because of its higher biodiversity compared to surrounding farmland.