http://pangea.stanford.edu/~kurt/kurt-mining-methods.

html

Mining methods
So mining just involves a couple of strong backs, a few picks and shovels, and a love of loud, dark, wet, hot places that smell bad, right? Well, mining actually requires a lot of technical skill and planning. Underground mining, for example, must solve such problems as:

preventing rock from collapsing from the back ("ceiling") getting fresh air to the miners keeping working conditions cool enough (it gets HOT down there!) getting power to the drills, etc. getting ore out of the hole efficiently safeguarding against accidents such as fire, etc.

Surface mining is no cake-walk, either. Open pit mines are not just large holes dug in the ground. Mine engineers have all kinds of clever ways to keep the sides of the hole from sliding in. And since mining open pits is a game of keeping costs down, pit optimization is a big worry (i.e. organizing the roads in/out of the pit, organizing truck schedules, figuring out how much ore to blast at a time, etc.) I've tried to summarize some of the main mining methods with which I am familiar in the following paragraphs. I've scanned a few drawings from the truly outstanding introduction to mining published by the U.S. Forest Service titled "Anatomy of a mine from prospect to Production -- USDA General Technical Report INT-35 -- and thrown in a few photographs of what these places look like. Personally, I've only worked in open pit mines and an underground under-cut-and-fill mine (mostly the latter). Finally, here (43 kb) is a summary diagram explaining the names of all the different kinds of tunnels in an underground mine. I am no mining engineer, though. I see that this is a particularly popular page, visited by a lot of universities that are well known for producing excellent mining engineers. If any of you have any suggestions or corrections, feel free to e-mail me at kurt@pangea.stanford.edu.

Underground mining methods

Block Cave
(179 kb) -- a mining method in which ore is allowed to collapse due to its own weight in a controlled fashion into chutes. Block caving is usually used to mine large orebodies that have consistent grade throughout.

Shrinkage stope
(173 kb) -- a mining method in which ore is mined from a vein from the bottom up. This is what they did in the Superior mine where I did my PhD research. First, a drift is dug at one level of the vein. Progressively higher levels are blasted and allowed to fill in much of the void (except for a working space). Since broken up rock has air spaces between the pieces, the overall volume is larger than the original vein, so broken ore must be removed from the vein with each cut. The miners are always working on a surface of broken up ore. Eventually, the entire vein has been blasted and is filled with broken ore. The miners then pull out and extract the broken up ore by a process similar to block caving. Shrink stoping is used for high-grade vein orebodies.

Undercut-and-Fill
-- a mining method in which miners mine the shallowest level first. Once the shallowest level is mined, they fill all of the tunnels with a mixture of sand and cement. The miners then proceed to mine the next deeper level. The roof of each successive level is thus made of cemented sand which has a very predictable strength and low density. Undercut-and-fill is a useful technique when the orebody is composed of very heavy ore that could otherwise easily collapse on miners.

Square-set stoping
(84 kb) -- This is a useful system when your ore is a rock that won't form nice stable tunnels (i.e. it is all fractured up and so tends to cave in on you). This is really the pre-cursor to the "undercut-and-fill" method used at Superior. The only real difference is that, instead of working their way deeper, the miners start at the bottom of the orebody and work their way up. Both the square-set stoping and undercut-and-fill methods require highly skilled miners capable of constructing the wooden supports. As a mine geologist once told me, "We're basically building an underground sky-scraper!"

Room-and-Pillar
(159 kb) -- a mining method in which most of the ore is mined, but parts of the orebody are left behind to act as supporting pillars to hold up the rock overhead. Room-and-pillar mining is commonly used for large flat orebodies such as salt deposits, coal, limestone, and other similar mines.

Hydraulic stope fill

(109 kb)

Surface mining methods

Open Pit
(150 kb) -- pretty self-explanatory, really. Here is a photo of the Bingham open pit mine near Salt Lake City, Utah taken by Patrick Redmond (one of my colleagues here at Stanford). The snow really highlights the benches. Bingham was the first bulk-tonnage mine. Before they began mining Bingham, the economics of whether a mine was profitable or not depended mostly on the how much high-grade ore there was to mine (because high grade ore contains more metal and so can be sold for more money). Then, in 1905 or so, someone got wise and said, "You know, you can cut way back on costs if you just figure out a way to mine very large quantities at a time" (sort of taking after the Henry Ford model of assembly- line manufacturing of cars, I guess). So they began digging up the very large, relatively low-grade copper mine here at Bingham and have been digging there ever since. It was, at least up until recently, the biggest open pit in the world, although I hear Chuquicamata in Chile may have stolen away that honor.

Glory Hole mining

(109 kb) -- a variation on the block caving method in which the ore is mined all the way to the surface.

Very nice summary diagram of the processing proceedure involved in converting low-grade copper ores into copper metal (107.5 kb) published by the Arizona Mining Association
(107 kb) If you're still thirsty for knowledge after surfing around my pages, I'd also recommend visiting an outstanding page devoted to mining methods made by the students at R.D. Parker Collegiate in Manitoba. They've put together truly inspiring collection of web pages describing both surface and underground mining methods. The underground pages appear to still be under heavy construction, but some of the surface mining pages are really worth your time. Lots of photos! They even discuss future mining methods -- very nice! The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, Inc. has a concise litttle page devoted to mining methods. The Uranium Institute has a nice suite of pages describing Uranium mining methods and uranium-related topics. The University of Kentucky has a fine page dedicated to coal mining. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources also has several pages devoted primarilly to underground coal mining methods.