North Bohemian Basin
The North Bohemian Basin (formerly also: Teplitz-Komotauer Basin , Czech .: Mostecká pánev ) is a landscape in North Bohemia ( Czech Republic ). It shapes the western part of the Ústecký kraj ( Aussig region ).
Adjacent landscapes
The basin lies between the central and eastern Ore Mountains in the north and the Rakovnická pahorkatina mountains in the south. In the east the basin borders on the Bohemian Central Mountains and the foothills of the Bohemian Switzerland and in the southeast on the landscape area Dolnooharská tabule (about Untereger table ). In the west it touches the Duppau Mountains .
geology
The basin is part of the Eger Trench . The geological conditions in the North Bohemian Basin are mainly causally related to the geological situation of the large neighboring regions of the Ore Mountains and the Central Bohemian Uplands .
With the uplift of the Erzgebirge Pultscholle at the time of the Tertiary , accompanied by strong volcanism in today's Bohemian Central Uplands, a natural ditch was created, which today defines this basin landscape.
The storage conditions in the basin sediments and their mineralogical composition are complicated because very different substance inputs have mixed here. The ditch quickly filled with bodies of water due to natural precipitation and watercourses. The earlier violent volcanic activity in the region brought in volcanic ashes and lavas , which underwent considerable chemical dissolution and transformation processes when they came into contact with water in this rift valley, as part of the sediment. The dissolved fractions and those that only existed as suspended matter quickly spread in the waters and were deposited as sediment fractions in highly differentiated proportions.
From the southern side of today's Ore Mountains, the northern flank of the Bohemian Central Mountains and the chalk deposits still present in the basin (e.g. Teplice), sands , clay minerals and lime were washed out and also washed in. This nutrient-rich and water-rich situation was the basis for a vigorously developing fauna and flora . After being covered with mineral and humus-containing sediments, parts of the former tertiary forest have led to the formation of brown coal deposits , which have been in industrial use since the 19th century .
Occasionally clay sediments with a high content of charred organic residues were set on fire by natural circumstances ( mountain pressure- oxygen ratios, lightning strike, forest fire). The spreading underground smoldering have a generally layered occurring rock that Porzellaniten generated. Even pure coal seams have produced porcelainite in their contact zone with clays in such fires . They are also referred to as seam fire rocks. Due to their porcelain-like nature and strength, these were occasionally the target of commercial mining in order to produce ballast for road construction. The lignite open- cast mining companies mainly used these deposits for their own operational purposes.
The current soil level in the North Bohemian Basin is significantly higher than when this rift zone was formed, as erosion and sedimentation have taken place over a period of around 33 million years (since the Priabonian period ). During these processes, deposits were built up to a thickness of 700 meters, but on average around 300 meters. These sediment sequences consist of the regional units Altsedletzer Formation / Staro-Sedelské souvrství (Upper Eocene ), Stresauer Formation / Střezovské souvrství ( Oligocene ) Brüxer Formation / Mostecké souvrství (Upper Oligocene to Lower Miocene ).
Waters and hydrological conditions
The basin is drained to the east towards the Elbe by the rivers Bílina ( Biela ) and Ohře ( Eger ).
From the former lake landscapes in parts of the North Bohemian Basin, hardly any original remains have been preserved due to the intensive open-cast lignite mining and the associated devastation . Extensive landscapes with ponds and wet meadows existed around the town of Duchcov and west of Most towards the village of Jezeří .
The latter area was called Die See-Wiese (Czech: Komořanské jezero) and was enclosed by the earlier villages of Tschausch , Seestadtl and Niedergeorgenthal . In order to enable agricultural and later mining use, several water ditches had been dug because the seasonal water level in this area could fluctuate. The area of the lake meadow was about 25 square kilometers with a length of about 7 kilometers and a width of about 4.5 kilometers. Two bodies of water, the old pond near Niedergeorgenthal and the stone pond near Seestadtl, were permanently in existence. Originally they belonged to the area of the much larger Lake Kommern, which was only available as a moor area, the lake meadow , as early as the 19th century . A tip-like extension of the wetland, the Laucher Wiesen , created a connection with the city and the further course of the Bílina in the direction of the urban area of Brüx / Most.
The layers near the surface consist, as far as they are still present in their original form, of diluvial and limnic sediments. Layers of quicksand are stored in the sediment sequences . These sand horizons occasionally cause great problems in the mining areas and, when they move, have in turn led to considerable, large-scale subsidence. This phenomenon is particularly well-known in the Brüx / Most region and caused considerable collapse in some coal mines for the first time from 1874 to 1876. In dramatic cases, the opencast mine was filled with masses of mud and sand in an extremely short period of time, resulting in deaths and considerable economic damage. The population felt a subsidence and sometimes a lack of well water in almost all places in the region. One consequence was a large number of exploratory boreholes in the brown coal area between Brüx and Komotau in order to get an idea of the extent of those sand layers and to better assess the hydrogeological relationships.
Overall, the area belongs to the water catchment area of the Bílina, which was piped due to the opencast mining activities in the 20th century at the former place Seestadtl and now flows through the so-called Ervěnický koridor .
Open-cast lignite mining since the 19th century has completely changed this landscape and has caused massive damage to the region's ecosystem. This particularly affects the groundwater conditions as well as the entire flora and fauna, which in turn has repercussions on the regional climatic conditions.
Mining and industry
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The lignite deposits in the North Bohemian Basin have been mined to a small extent since the 15th century. In 1403 a lignite mine near Duchcov ( Dux ) was mentioned, in 1566 and 1605 there were mentions of mines near Hrob ( Klostergab ) and 1591 near Hrbovice ( Herbitz ). In the middle of the 16th century, some alum plants were built near Duchcov (Dux), Chomutov ( Komotau ) and Most ( Brüx ) that produced vitriol and alum from alum slate and the lignite. Up until the 19th century, mining was concentrated on the seams near the surface, which were mainly conveyed in so-called "farmer pits" using conveying buckets and reels .
In the second half of the 19th century the industrial intensification of civil engineering took place after high-quality hard brown coal. With the settlement in particular of glass, porcelain and sugar factories, of iron and mechanical engineering companies as well as chemical factories (founded by the Austrian Association for Chemical and Metallurgical Production, among others ), an important sales market emerged. In addition, there was the steadily increasing demand from neighboring Saxony.
To improve the removal of the lignite, the Dux-Bodenbacher Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft and the Aussig-Teplitzer Eisenbahngesellschaft built several railway lines in the North Bohemian Basin from 1858. The Nossen – Moldau railway line was opened in 1885 to improve the connection of the Saxon sales market .
In the course of the industrialization of mining, several large mining companies emerged from 1871, which combined the small pits that had dominated until then. The Brüxer Kohlenbergbaugesellschaft (1871), the Wiener Kohlebund (1872), the Duxer Kohlengesellschaft (1872), the Brucher Kohlenwerke (1888) and the North Bohemian Coal Company (1892) were formed. The Brucher Coal Works Union alone achieved an annual production of 1.8 million tons of lignite in 1896 with a workforce of over 3,300. 75% of the coal was exported to northern Germany and Bavaria.
The towns of Chomutov ( Komotau ), Most ( Brüx ), Teplice ( Teplitz ) and Ústí nad Labem ( Aussig ) developed into industrial centers in the North Bohemian Basin.
At the beginning of the 20th century, open-cast mining replaced the previously dominant civil engineering . On the one hand, this enabled large-scale equipment to be used more effectively, and on the other hand, the large-scale overprinting of the landscape began. The industrial coal extraction had an impact on the landscape, the settlement structures and the water network of the basin.
Immediately after the Sudetenland became part of Germany in October 1938, Sudetenlandische Treibstoffwerke AG (STW) near Litvínov (Leutensdorf) began building a hydrogenation plant for the production of synthetic gasoline from lignite. Most of the North Bohemian lignite mines were combined in the Sudetenländische Bergbau AG (SUBAG) from 1939 . Only a few smaller pits that were not affected by the Aryanization initially remained independent.
After the Second World War, all mines in the Czechoslovak state enterprise Severočeské doly were opened. Large-scale lignite mining reached its peak in the following decades. In the economic self-sufficiency policy of Czechoslovakia , the North Bohemian lignite played a key role, especially for energy generation. The opening of large open-cast mines such as B. the opencast mine Nástup – Tušimice (from 1953) was intensified. Since the 1960s a number of large power plants have been built in Ledvice ("Ladowitz", commissioning 1969, 640 MW), in Počerady (commissioning 1977, 1200 MW), in Prunéřov ( Brunnersdorf , commissioning 1967/68 with 66 MW and 1981/82 with 1050 MW) and in Tušimice (commissioning 1973/74, 800 MW). The settlement of large companies in the chemical industry and heavy industry was preferred near the cheap energy source lignite.
Coal production reached around 75 million tons per year in the 1980s. At this time, the environmental degradation and landscape overprinting of the conglomerate of mining, power generation and the chemical industry reached its peak. More than 100 towns fell victim to the large-scale opencast mines. The most striking example of the change in the landscape was the devastation of large parts of the city of Most ( Brüx ) since the 1960s. The church "Assumption of Mary" was moved in 1975 in a spectacular action by over 800 meters.
By open-cast mining and chemical industries large parts of the basin were devastated and forest damage in the adjacent mountains, especially in the Erzgebirge caused and impaired health of the inhabitants of the basin.
The future Czech President Václav Havel wrote to his wife in 1982:
- " Northern Bohemia is an important source of fuel for us ... (if you can call it that with a little bit of brown coal added), but at the price that it ceases to be a piece of our homeland (it becomes something between the moon and the garbage dump) . "
Today the North Bohemian Basin is one of the most densely populated regions in the Czech Republic and has been struggling with structural problems since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 in the socio-economic transformation as an old industrial landscape.
Other raw soil materials from the North Bohemian Basin that have been used for long periods of time by commercial activities include limestone (for building lime ), plan (for building lime and building stone ), sandstone (for building stone), clay and loam (for ceramic purposes and bricks ) , Tertiary quartzite ( silica stones ) as well as mineral water and peat (fuel). Some of them are still being won today (2009).
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Roland Vinx: Rock determination in the field . 2nd Edition. Springer, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8274-1925-5 , pp. 358 .
- ↑ Ivo Chlupáč u. a .: Geologická minulost České Republiky. Academia, Prague 2002, pp. 306, 311-313.
- ↑ Bureau of the Royal Saxon General Staff (ed.): Map of the German Empire. 1: 100000. Sheet 470 Sayda. 1882
- ↑ Ivo Chlupáč u. a .: Geologická minulost České Republiky. Academia, Prague 2002, p. 381.
- ↑ Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Explanations of the geological map of the area around Brüx. Nákladem Stát. geologického ústavu ČSL. Rep., Prague 1929, pp. 36-44.
- ↑ New Yearbook for Mineralogy, Geology and Palaontology , Part 2, p. 244
- ^ Karl M. Brousek: The big industry of Bohemia 1848-1914. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1987, p. 124
- ↑ The North Bohemian Lignite District - Information from the Museum Most ( Memento of the original from June 29, 2011 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. (Accessed October 13, 2012)
- ↑ quoted in: Wolfram Pflug (ed.): Brown coal opencast mining and recultivation. Springer Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 1
- ↑ Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Explanations of the geological map of the area around Brüx. Nákladem Stát. geologického ústavu ČSL. Rep., Prague 1929, pp. 86-93.
- ↑ Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Geological map of the Bohemian Central Mountains. Sheet 7 (Teplitz-Boreslau) with explanations. Hölder, Vienna 1908, pp. 97–98.
- ↑ Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Geological map of the Bohemian Central Mountains. Sheet 12 (Gartitz-Tellnitz) with explanations. Hölder, Vienna 1914, p. 70.
literature
- V. Cajz et al. a .: České Středohorí. Geologická a přírodovědná mapa Český geologický ústav, Prague 1996, ISBN 80-7075-238-6 ( Central Bohemian Uplands, geological hiking map. ).
- Ivo Chlupáč u. a .: Geologická minulost České Republiky. Academia, Prague 2002, ISBN 80-200-0914-0 .
- Josef Emanuel Hibsch : Explanations of the geological map of the area around Brüx. Nákladem Stát. geologického ústavu ČSL. Rep., Prague 1929.
- Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Geological map of the Bohemian Central Uplands. Sheet 7 (Teplitz-Boreslau) with explanations. Hölder, Vienna 1908.
- Josef Emanuel Hibsch: Geological map of the Bohemian Central Uplands. Sheet 12 (Gartitz-Tellnitz) with explanations. Hölder, Vienna 1914.
- Theodor von Hohendorf: The Aussig-Teplitz lignite basin in relation to its storage, mining, operating conditions and utilization of coal as an explanation of the mining district map , Teplitz 1867 ( digitized version )
- Roland Vinx: Rock determination in the field . 2nd Edition. Springer, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8274-1925-5 .
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 30 ′ 0 ″ N , 13 ° 30 ′ 0 ″ E