Identification of the subsurface sulfide bodies responsible for acidity in Río Tinto source water, Spain

The acidic waters of the Río Tinto rise from several acidic springs that emerge in the area surrounding Peña de Hierro (Fernández-Remolar et al., 2005). These springs are located above minor normal faults that act as natural conduits for the water from the underlying deep aquifer. Although it has been suggested that the acidity of the river originates from the biooxidation of massive and stockwork sulfides (Fernández-Remolar et al., 2008a), the location of the source for these acidic solutions has not previously been established. This lack of evidence has been used to suggest that the acidity of the Río Tinto may be the product of the most conspicuous of the possible source, the extensive mining of the area over approximately the last 5000 years (Davis et al., 2000). In this paper, we report resistivity and time-domain electromagnetic sounding data from the Río Tinto aquifer to a depth of ∼600 m, revealing the locations for the acidic sources. Both types of data support the presence of two distinct geological units that we interpret as thrust sheets emplaced onto each other during the Variscan orogeny of the Carboniferous. These units, both of which contain massive and stockwork sulfides, act as the aquifer for the acidic waters of the Río Tinto. Under this scenario, which is in agreement with the geological record of the Río Tinto fluvial system for the past 6 Ma (Moreno et al., 2003), our results imply that mining activity had little influence on the generation of the acidic river waters. •The environment of Río Tinto is been claimed to be a strongly contaminated system.•We provide evidences of the presence in the subsurface of sulfide orebodies.•Stable isotopic analyses suggest that Rio Tinto waters are fed in the underground.•We conclude that biooxidation induced the Río Tinto acidity over million of years.•Mining activity has had a secondary influence for the last thousand years.