Kalavasos Mines - The Inclined Shaft Traditional Geocache
Kalavasos Mines - The Inclined Shaft
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The goal is to have a short series of caches highlighting what remains of the historic yet vanishing Kalavosos Mines area.
The mining area of Kalavasos covers a range of 18 square kilometres and was actively mined from the Phoenicians, the Ptolemy's, the Romans and into the modern era until mining ceased altogether in 1978. The mines harvested Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide (VMS) ores namely Copper and Pyrite; although some Gold and Silver to a lesser extent via both sub-surface and surface mining.
Sadly little is available other than there were five mines that operated in the area of Kalavasos. These mines are known by the names "Platies", "Petra", "Mavri Sykia", "Lantaria", and "Mavridia", all of them belonging to the Greek Mining Company (E.M.E). The total deposit has been estimated to contain 8.5 million tons of Copper Ore of which ~5 million tons have been extracted.
The water you see draining from the nearby shaft is called Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) or Acid Rock Drainage (ARD) and refers to the outflow of acidic water from usually abandoned metal mines or coal mines but other areas where the earth has been disturbed. Acid rock drainage occurs naturally within some environments as part of the rock weathering process but is exacerbated by large-scale earth disturbances characteristic of mining and other large construction activities, usually within rocks containing an abundance of sulfide minerals.
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(Decrypt)
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