Heavy metal content of the Posidonia shales on Wegener Halvø

Abstract

In the summer of 1968 two prospectors from Nordisk Mineselskab NS examined a number of mineral indications on Wegener Halvø, which had been described by Eklund (1944). During the work they discovered that the bituminous Permian shales, the Posidonia shales, first found at this locality by Noe-Nygaard (1934), showed rather high contents of copper and lead minerals. At ten localities examined nine showed signs of mineralization (Lehnert-Thiel, personal communication, 1968) and it was therefore decided to make a detailed sampling profile the folIowing year. In 1969 four men, including the writer dug a 20 m long trench up to 1.6 m deep through the Posidonia shales in order to obtain fresh samples. The trench was situated about 550 m a.s.l. in the south-west part of the valley of Vimmelskaftet on Wegener Halvø (fig. 1). Under the Posidonia shales a stratum of reefy limestone forms a vertical wall 50-100 m high, and the shales themselves are covered by steep slopes of scree. In the trench, which ran from the reef upwards through the lowermost 16 m of the shales, a continuous 5 by 5 cm channel sample was excavated and divided in 39 parts corresponding to lithological units.