Copperbelt

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Geographical location of the Copperbelt
Carrollite (silvery) and chalcopyrite (brass yellow) on calcite (white) from Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo (size: 5.3 cm × 3.8 cm × 3.0 cm)
Solid copper from the Copperbelt (size: 3.1 cm × 2.9 cm × 1.1 cm)

The Copperbelt ( English , German  copper belt ) is an industrial region in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo . It is the most important copper mining area in Africa and the largest industrial area in sub- Saharan Africa outside of South Africa . In addition to copper, cobalt and other metals are also extracted.

geography

The Copperbelt is characterized by the occurrence of copper ores. It is located on a plateau at the eastern end of the Lundaschwelle about 1200 to 1300 meters above sea level. It is located in the center of Zambia and in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is an area about 800 kilometers long and 250 kilometers wide that extends from Luanshya in the southeast to north of Kolwezi in the northwest. The Zambian part belongs mainly to the Copperbelt Province , the Congolese part to the former Katanga Province . This part extends far into Zambian territory.

Important cities in the Zambian part are Ndola , Kitwe , Chingola , Luanshya and Mufulira , which are among the ten largest Zambian cities. Significant traffic routes here are the railway line between Lusaka and Lubumbashi including branching branches and the trunk roads T3 and T4 .

The largest Congolese city in the Copperbelt is Lubumbashi , which is the second largest city in the country. The part north of Lubumbashi is not so strongly determined by copper mining and is occasionally not counted as part of the Copperbelt.

meaning

More than a tenth of the world's copper deposits are in the Copperbelt. In 1988, Zambia achieved over 90 percent of its foreign trade revenues from the export of copper, the Democratic Republic of the Congo up to 40 percent. The DR Congo is the world market leader in the extraction of cobalt. Around 53 percent of the cobalt exported worldwide came from the Copperbelt in 2006, almost three quarters of which came from the DR Congo.

geology

The copper ores are stored in late Precambrian sediments . These are ore horizons up to twelve meters thick embedded in sequences of sandstone , conglomerates , bituminous clay slate and dolomites . They belong to the Lower Roan of the Shaba formation . Sometimes the copper is also dignified.

The copperbelt is part of the Lufilian arch . Intracontinental rifting began around 880 million years ago and was accompanied by magmatism . The basins formed by aulacogenic , not oceanic spreading and relatively shallow rift breaks filled with sea water and absorbed 5 to 10 km thick sediment layers, which are known as Katanga Supergroup. The surrounding terrane and orogen , especially the still contiguous Congo-São Francisco craton, served as sediment sources .

The Katanga Supergroup is divided into three lithostratigraphic groups and several subgroups by default . The groups correspond to the respective rifts, while the sub-groups represent further basins that have arisen in the rifts. The lowest is the 880 mya old Roan group, which is a continental drift with fluvial (river) and lacrustine (lake) sediments. The Nguba group followed from 765 mya and was a proto-oceanic rift, similar to the Afar Triangle / Red Sea . From 650 mya, the Kundelungu group deposited, which corresponded to an epicontinental lagoon.

The ores were probably contained in hydrothermal , metal-containing fluids, which in turn developed from brines during the basin formation and tectonic processes. The metal fluids spread along the main thrust zones and other structural discontinuities such as faults, breccias or karsts . In these areas, the ores precipitated preferentially in the form of the mineral chalcopyrite , the copper content of which can be up to about 34%.

The ore deposits in the approximately 600 to 800 km long Katanga Copperbelt in the Congo developed in carbonate- rich metasedimentary rocks of an original evaporite environment with frequent seawater transgressions and regressions . Lithostratigraphically, they belong to the three upper subgroups Mines (R2), Dipeta (R3) and Mwashya (R4) of the Roan group and to the basal layer of the Nguba group. Major mines are Lonshi in the south, Shinkolobwe in the middle and Tenke-Fungurume in the north.

In the Zambian Copperbelt, which is about 160 km long and runs parallel to the lower area of ​​the Katanga Copperbelt, the ore deposits were formed in silica layers of a rift basin without evaporite conditions. Lithostratigraphically they are in the uppermost layer of the Nkana Mindola Formation and the Copperbelt Orebody Member. The latter forms the lowest layer in the Kitwe formation of the Lower Roan subgroup in the Zambia-specific series of lithographs. These are stratigraphically comparable with the subgroups RAT (R1) and the Mines (R2) of the Roan group of the Katanga Copperbelt. There are abundant mines around Luanshya in the south, Kitwe in the middle and Chingola in the north.

history

Opencast mine and headframes of a ZCCM mine near Kitwe

The African inhabitants in the area of ​​today's Copperbelt had for centuries had the ability to extract copper from the ores and to trade with the goods made from it. With the Belgian geologist Jules Cornet, his expedition in 1892 brought the first comprehensive knowledge of the mineral wealth of the Katanga region to Europe. The knowledge of the abundance of raw materials here developed into a political conflict between Belgium and England, which in 1894 led to the division of the copper region between the two powers. Further expeditions followed between 1899 and 1902 with further knowledge about the huge raw material deposits. The geographical division of the copper belt into a British and Belgian area of ​​interest is a result of the colonial era.

In 1895, the American Frederick Russell Burnham discovered during an expedition that there must be large copper deposits in the area. At that time the northern part of the Copperbelt belonged to the colonial area of Belgium , the southern part to that of the United Kingdom . The British South Africa Company took over the exploitation of these deposits in the southern part.

Among other things, railway lines were built here in the first third of the 20th century, which enabled copper mining products to be shipped from African ports on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to other customers. There has been an increase in European mining activities in this region since 1910. This point in time is related to the development of rail traffic when the railway line from the south via Ndola finally reached Élisabethville (Lubumbashi) and near this town the Étoile du Congo mine (German: "Star of the Congo"). From the beginning, copper mining was organized as a monopoly , since the mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), founded in 1906 and controlled by Belgian capital, dominated local raw material exploration and mining. She was granted her mining rights until 1990 and these covered an area of ​​over 20,000 square kilometers with all the copper deposits known at the time. By 1967 the UMHK was able to build a powerful empire, which also extended over another 14,000 square kilometer concession area for tin mining and rights of use for the mining of limestone and coal as well as the use of hydropower. The beginning of European mining in the copper belt is closely linked to the Étoile du Congo opencast mine, founded in 1908 . In 1911 copper smelting began in Elisabethville. In the 1920s, further mining activities increased in other places in the region, for example at Kipushi from 1926 . In Likasi- Panda, additional smelting plants were built between 1921 and 1928 for the nearby mining industry. The Great Depression ended also the rapid increase in the montane economic development, recovered only after the 1935th So in 1937 there was a significant development of copper mining in Kolwezi . Due to the material requirements of the war economy, the demand for germanium , cadmium , cobalt and copper from these deposits rose to maximum values around 1940 .

Within what was then the Belgian Congo , a railway line to Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika was built . From 1960 to 1963 what was then Katanga was virtually independent after a war of civil secession. Around 750,000 tons of copper were extracted in Zambia in the 1960s. From 1971 to 1999 the DR Congo was called Zaïre ; Katanga Province was called Shaba .

The Benguela Railway to Lobito on the Atlantic was destroyed by the Angolan civil war , and the connection to Beira on the Indian Ocean could not be used because of the boycott of the minority regime in Rhodesia at the time. In 1976 the TAZARA was opened as a connection between the Copper Belt and the port of Dar es Salaam .

The fall in copper prices on the world market from 1974 and especially from the end of the 1990s hit the Copperbelt particularly hard. In 2000, the production volume in Zambia was only 256,900 tons of copper. In addition, the one-sided dependence on copper mining created serious environmental problems. When the copper ores are refined, large amounts of arsenic compounds and carbon monoxide are released. The landscape was also largely destroyed by the opencast mine . The development of the settlement was determined by the interests of the mining companies, so that large-scale, urban areas without adequate infrastructure emerged.

From 2003 to 2007 the price of copper quadrupled, so that the production volume increased. In 2006, 497,000 tons of copper were extracted in Zambia. In 2009, the Lumwana Mine west of Solwezi , near Chisasa , the largest Zambian copper mine, was commissioned by the operator Barrick Gold . In this context, a new railway line is planned, the North-Western Railway Line projected from Chingola to Angola .

See also

literature

  • Francis L. Coleman: Northern Rhodesia Copperbelt, 1899-1962: Technological Development Up to the End of the Central African Federation . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1971, ISBN 0-7190-0419-5
  • James Ferguson: Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian copperbelt . University of California Press, Los Angeles 1999, ISBN 0-520-21702-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fischer Weltalmanach '95 . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994
  2. ↑ US Government Minerals website (PDF, 62 kB), accessed September 27, 2010
  3. ^ Hans Kramer et al .: Haack map book Africa. VEB Hermann Haack Geographisch-Kartographische Anstalt, Gotha 1989, ISBN 3-7301-0092-0 , p. 91
  4. ↑ Mwabanwa Louis Kipata, Damien Delvaux, Mwene Ntabwoba Sebagenzi, Jacques Cailteux, Manuel Sintubin: Brittle tectonic and stress field evolution in the Pan-African Lufilian arc and its foreland (Katanga, DRC): from orogenic compression to extensional collapse, transpressional inversion and transition to rifting. In: Geologica Belgica . tape 16 , no. 1/2 , 2013, p. 1-17 ( PDF ).
  5. ↑ Katanga Supergroup WENDORFF, Marek, Geology Department, Univ. of Botswana
  6. ^ Roan Group USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2010–5090 – T
  7. ↑ a b M. J. Batumike, AB Kampunzu, JH Cailteux: Petrology and geochemistry of the Neoproterozoic Nguba and Kundelungu Groups, Katangan Supergroup, south east Congo: Implications for provenance, paleoweathering and geotectonic setting . In: Journal of African Earth Sciences . tape 44 , no. 1 , January 2006, p. 97–115 , doi : 10.1016 / j.jafrearsci.2005.11.007 ( PDF ).
  8. ^ Katanga Copperbelt Porter Geo Consultancy
  9. ↑ Tenke-Fungurume Tenke Fungurume Mining
  10. ^ Zambia Copperbelt Porter Geo Consultancy
  11. ↑ Nkana-Mindola Formation eprints.utas.edu.au Chap3
  12. ↑ Copperbelt Orebody Member eprints.utas.edu.au Chap6
  13. ↑ Bernd Wiese: Zaire: National nature, population, economy . Scientific Book Society , Darmstadt 1980, pp. 12, 193
  14. ↑ a b c Website on industry worldwide ( Memento of May 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 27, 2010
  15. ^ René Arthur Pelletier: Mineral Resources of South-Central Africa . Oxford University Press , Cape Town 1964, p. 215
  16. ↑ Bernd Wiese: Zaire . 1980, p. 193
  17. ↑ Analysis of the copper mining in Zambia ( Memento of October 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  18. ↑ Information on the Lumwana mine ( Memento from July 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 27, 2010
  19. ↑ Barrick: Lumwana copper mine . on www.barrick.com ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ^ The Post: Government to construct Solwezi-Walvis Bay railway link . Message from August 19, 2011 from The Post at www.trademarksa.org ( Memento from January 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  21. ↑ Times of Zambia: Govt's move on RSZ issue bold . News from the Times of Zambia on September 11, 2012 on www.ukzambians.co.uk ( Memento of the original from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ukzambians.co.uk

Coordinates: 12 ° 23 ′  S , 27 ° 57 ′  E