The Northland Pyrite Mine, also known as James Lake Mine, Rib Lake Mine, Harris Mine or simply Northland Mine, is an abandoned

underground mine Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic via ...

Northeastern Ontario Northeastern Ontario is a secondary region of Northern Ontario in the Canadian province of Ontario, which lies north of Lake Huron and east of Lake Superior. Northeastern Ontario consists of the districts of Algoma, Sudbury, Cochrane, Timiskami ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, located on the southwestern shore of

James Lake James A. Lake (born August 10, 1941, Kearney, Nebraska) is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology and of Human Genetics at UCLA. Lake is best known for the New Animal Phyloge ...

in Best Township of

Temagami Temagami, formerly spelled as Timagami, is a municipality in northeastern Ontario, Canada, in the Nipissing District with Lake Temagami at its heart. The Temagami region is known as ''n'Daki Menan'', the homeland of the area's First Nations c ...

. It was operated by the Northland Mining Company during the early 1900s with the construction of a shaft and many open-cuts north of the shaft. Minerals present at the mine include

chalcopyrite Chalcopyrite ( ) is a copper iron sulfide mineral and the most abundant copper ore mineral. It has the chemical formula CuFeS2 and crystallizes in the tetragonal system. It has a brassy to golden yellow color and a hardness of 3.5 to 4 on the Mo ...

pyrite The mineral pyrite (), or iron pyrite, also known as fool's gold, is an iron sulfide with the chemical formula Fe S2 (iron (II) disulfide). Pyrite is the most abundant sulfide mineral. Pyrite's metallic luster and pale brass-yellow hue giv ...

and

pyrrhotite Pyrrhotite is an iron sulfide mineral with the formula Fe(1-x)S (x = 0 to 0.2). It is a nonstoichiometric variant of FeS, the mineral known as troilite. Pyrrhotite is also called magnetic pyrite, because the color is similar to pyrite and it i ...

, deposited in Precambrian

volcanic rock Volcanic rock (often shortened to volcanics in scientific contexts) is a rock formed from lava erupted from a volcano. In other words, it differs from other igneous rock by being of volcanic origin. Like all rock types, the concept of volcanic ...

of the Canadian Shield.

History

Before the operation of Northland Pyrite Mine in the early 1900s, water levels of James Lake increased and decreased.Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists
/ref> The cause of this alternation could have been caused by beavers building dams in the lake's outlet, eventually causing the water levels to rise. This rise in water levels began to cease in 1906 when operations of the Northland Pyrite Mine began to dump volcanic waste rock along the southwestern shore of James Lake. This began with the construction of the shaft and the several open-cuts north of the shaft, but the mine site was originally discovered in 1903.Geology adjacent to Highway 11 in Best Township and the south part of Gillies Limit Township districts of Timiskaming and Nipissing
/ref> Erosion of the volcanic waste rock resulted in the development of acidic lake wastewaters next to the waste pile, causing organisms around the mine to disappear. The name ''Harris Mine'' was coined for Northland Pyrite Mine by E.L. Fraleck in 1907 when Northland was actively operating for a year. From February 1906 to March 1911, the Northland Pyrite Mine was in nearly continuous production. According to a former report from the Ontario Northland Railway, 76,067,050 pounds were sent throughout this epoch and was shipped to the town of

Cobalt Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, p ...

further north. A.A. Cole, who was the former manager of the former Temiskaming Testing Laboratories facility in Cobalt, stated the closure of Northland was due to the mine transporting

instead of pyrite for three days. The mined pyrrhotite was said to be in a parallel lens to the mined pyrite and its quality was unnoticed. During mine closer in March 1911, the shaft was filled in with logs and waste rock and the adjacent waters of James Lake has since flooded the mine to create more acidic lake wastewater. Colours of the wastewater range from orange to dark red in the central portion of the mine site and green in a narrow open-cut at the southern end of the mine site just west of the mine shaft.

Geology

The Northland Pyrite Mine lies in a pyrite-bearing zone associated with a band of Keewatin bedded

tuff Tuff is a type of rock made of volcanic ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption. Following ejection and deposition, the ash is lithified into a solid rock. Rock that contains greater than 75% ash is considered tuff, while rock ...

s. This is the only major pyrite zone in the James Lake area and the Northland Pyrite Mine is the only past producer in the area, with no operating mines present.

silver Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical ...

, molybdenum,

platinum Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Pla ...

nickel Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow ...

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...

and

copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkis ...

exist in the zone.

References

External links

*{{cite amis, 03788, Northland Pyrite, 2011-07-19 Underground mines in Canada Mines in Temagami Sulfur mines in Canada

History

Geology

See also

References

External links