Incomplete sulfide oxidation under sub-oxic conditions: Rates and aqueous sulfur speciation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The oxidative dissolution of sulfide minerals consumes oxygen and can generate redox gradients in mine wastes that affect the mobility of redox-sensitive solutes. However, the controls of oxygen depletion on sulfide reactivity and sulfur mobilization remain poorly constrained, complicating the long-term assessment of drainage quality dynamics. We investigated pyrite and Fe-rich sphalerite weathering using aqueous S speciation and quantitative mineralogical analyses under controlled, ambient versus sub-oxic, conditions at 6 < pH < 9. Titration assays revealed that oxidation rates for pyrite (up to 10−10 mol m−2 s−1) were higher than for sphalerite (up to 10−11 mol m−2 s−1) and, for both minerals, decreased by two orders-of-magnitude under sub-oxic (<50 ppm O2) conditions. Precipitation of secondary S-bearing minerals was restricted to elemental S, with no sulfate- or thiosulfate-salts detectable >0.01 wt%. Sulfate was the dominant aqueous S species produced in all experiments, but significant amounts of thiosulfate, tetrathionate, and sulfite were also found. These dissolved intermediate S species were abundant under both sub-oxic and oxic conditions, and broadly in line with known sulfide oxidation mechanisms, even though the weathering of pyrite produced several factors less incompletely oxidized S than that of sphalerite, under otherwise comparable conditions. This work shows that a range of intermediate S species may be produced even in low-reactivity conditions and may help optimize the management of such mine waste materials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".