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An introduction to this special section

Mining Geophysics

Library, Pennsylvania, USA

Special thanks and credits are extended to Bill Clement and Colin Farquharson for their contributions in reviewing the papers in this special section.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Who needs minerals? Actually, we all do. Our survival and existence depend largely on them. Mining is one of the earliest industries in which humans learned how to utilize the earth's natural resources to improve their lives. It probably began with the mining and mixing of sand and clay for making bricks, wood, and coal for heating, metallurgy for making utensils, coinage, and weaponry, and evolved to mining of gemstones for ornamental and industrial purposes.

A statistic distributed by the former U.S. Bureau of Mines some time ago indicated that the average American uses and consumes more than 2 million lbs of minerals in a lifetime. They are distributed as follows: 1.2 million lbs of building materials (sand, gravel, clay, stones, and cement), 360 000 lbs of coal, 81 000 lbs of iron and steel, 28 000 . . . [Full Text of this Article]