About
This website presents the research collection on the Medni Rid ridge and the Rosen ore field — an abandoned copper mining district in southeastern Bulgaria with 6,000 years of mining history.
The collection is built from primary scientific sources, with a focus on the two open-access anchor publications:
- Tzankova (2023), Geologica Balcanica — full PDF at geologica-balcanica.eu ★
- Krauss et al. (Eds, 2020), Prehistoric mining and metallurgy at the Southeast Bulgarian Black Sea coast, Tübingen University Press — free PDF via doi.org/10.15496/publikation-51192 ★
Data sources
All geographic and geological data on this site is derived from:
- SRTM DEM (30m resolution) via OpenTopography API — terrain model
- Fig.1 geological map (Tzankova 2023) — geological unit polygons, digitized via color segmentation
- Fig.8 cross-sections (Krauss et al. 2020) — subsurface pluton geometry, digitized from cross-section panels
- Fig.9 geo-structural map (Krauss et al. 2020) — vein and fault systems, digitized via color segmentation + skeletonization
- Tübingen catalogue (Krauss et al. 2020, pp. 329–392) — 15 mining/metallurgical sites with UTM coordinates
- Tzankova (2023) — mineral lists, deposit models, malachite geochemistry
- mindat.org (loc-25109) — mineral locality data
- OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) — settlement coordinates
Methodology
Geological maps and figures were digitized using Python (scikit-image) for color segmentation, morphological operations, and contour extraction. GeoJSON files were georeferenced using affine transforms with control points from known deposit locations and settlement coordinates.
All coordinate data is in WGS84 (EPSG:4326) unless otherwise noted. UTM coordinates from the source literature (zone 35T) were converted to WGS84 for web display.
Open access
The source data (GeoJSON, JSON, TypeScript files) is available in the project repository. The two anchor publications are open-access (CC BY-NC-ND for the Tübingen book).