WISTAMERZ website online – New data about the mineral wealth of the Erzgebirge is now available

Important results of the project are now available on the website www.wistamerz.de:

• the New Geochemical Atlas of the Erzgebirge/ Vogtland Region,
• the new Metallogenic Map of the Erzgebirge/ Vogtland Region and
• the reconstruction of the metallogenic history of the region.

During the three-year-lasting project, new data about the geochemistry and mineral occurrences of the region were collected and the historical data were gathered and systematised. The two databases were merged and used as a base for metallogenic modelling, mineral predictive mapping and a general evaluation of the region´s mineral prospectivity.

The new metallogenic model systematically explains the big variety of the mineral deposits of the Erzgebirge/ Vogtland as a logical chain of mineral deposit-forming processes and events lasting at least for 470 mio. years.

The fundamental precondition for the entire metallogenic history was the wide-spread formation of considerable synsedimentary enrichments of metals (e.g. Sn, W, Cu, Bi, Sb, Ag, Au) in lower Palaeozoic sediments which were investigated and described closer in the frame of the project. The identified metallotect stretches over the entire Erzgebirge from Klingenthal up to the region north of Freiberg.

For more details, please visit www.wistamerz.de.

The project was coordinated by Beak Consultants GmbH and completed together with the partners Technical University of Freiberg, Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology, Saxore Bergbau GmbH, and AVRUPA Minerals.

The project was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the frame of the r4-project “Raw materials of strategic economic importance for high-tech made in Germany” (www.r4-innovation.de; www.fona.de).

Beak thanks the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, the Saxon State Ministry of Economy, Labour and Traffic, the Saxon Authority for Agriculture, Environment and Geology, and the Saxon Mining Authority for supporting the project.

We thank LfULG Sachsen and Wismut GmbH as well as many private persons for providing sample material, historical data and archive documents to the project.