What is a quarry? Detailed analysis. Meaning of the word quarry

To the number amazing phenomena nature can certainly be attributed to periodically opening up in different places globe holes.

1.Kimberlite pipe "Mir" (Mir diamond pipe), Yakutia.

The Mir kimberlite pipe is a quarry located in the city of Mirny, Yakutia. The quarry has a depth of 525 m and a diameter of 1.2 km, and is one of the largest quarries in the world. Mining of diamond-bearing kimberlite ore ceased in June 2001. Currently, an underground mine of the same name is being built on board the quarry to develop the remaining sub-quarry reserves, the extraction of which by open-pit mining is unprofitable.

The world's largest diamond quarry is amazing.

2.Kimberlite pipe "Big Hole", South Africa.

The Big Hole is a huge inactive diamond mine in the city of Kimberley (South Africa). It is believed that this is the largest quarry developed by people without the use of technology. Currently it is the main attraction of the city of Kimberley.

From 1866 to 1914, approximately 50,000 miners dug the mine using picks and shovels, producing 2,722 tons of diamonds (14.5 million carats). During the development of the quarry, 22.5 million tons of soil were extracted. It was here that such famous diamonds as "De Beers" (428.5 carats), bluish-white "Porter-Rhodes" (150 carats), orange-yellow " Tiffany" (128.5 carats). Currently, this diamond deposit has been exhausted. The area of the “Big Hole” is 17 hectares. Its diameter is 1.6 km. The hole was dug to a depth of 240 meters, but was then filled with waste rock to a depth of 215 meters, currently the bottom of the hole is filled with water, its depth is 40 meters.

At the site of the mine previously (about 70 - 130 million years ago) there was a volcanic crater. Almost a hundred years ago - in 1914, development in the “Big Hole” was stopped, but the gaping crater of the pipe remains to this day and now serves only as a bait for tourists, serving as a museum. And... it starts to create problems. In particular, there was a serious danger of collapse not only of its edges, but also of the roads built in its immediate vicinity. South African road services have long banned the passage of heavy freight vehicles in these places, and now they strongly recommend that all other drivers avoid driving along Bultfontein Road in the Big Hole area. The authorities are going to completely block the dangerous section of the road. And the world's largest diamond company, De Beers, which owned this mine since 1888, did not find anything better than to get rid of it by putting it up for sale.

3. Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine, Utah.

The largest active open-pit mine in the world, copper mining began in 1863 and is still ongoing. About a kilometer deep and three and a half kilometers wide.

It is the world's largest anthropogenic formation (excavated by humans). It is a mine whose development is carried out using an open pit method.

As of 2008, it measures 0.75 miles (1.2 km) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covers an area of 1,900 acres (7.7 sq. km).

The ore was first discovered in 1850, and quarrying began in 1863, which continues to this day.

Currently, the quarry employs 1,400 people who extract 450,000 tons (408 thousand tons) of rock daily. The ore is loaded into 64 large dump trucks, which are capable of transporting 231 tons of ore, these trucks cost about $3 million each.

4. Diavik Quarry, Canada. Diamonds are mined.

The Canadian Diavik quarry is perhaps one of the youngest (in terms of development) diamond kimberlite pipes. It was first explored only in 1992, the infrastructure was created by 2001, and diamond mining began in January 2003. The mine is expected to last from 16 to 22 years.
The place where it emerges from the surface of the earth is unique in itself. Firstly, this is not one, but three pipes formed on the island of Las de Gras, approximately 220 km south of the Arctic Circle, off the coast of Canada. Because the hole is huge, and the island is in the middle Pacific Ocean small, only 20 km²

A short term The Diavik diamond mine has become one of the most important components of the Canadian economy. Up to 8 million carats (1,600 kg) of diamonds are mined from this deposit per year. An airfield was built on one of its neighboring islands, capable of receiving even huge Boeings. In June 2007, a consortium of seven mining companies announced their intention to sponsor environmental studies and begin construction of a major port on Canada's North Shore to accommodate cargo ships of up to 25,000 tons, as well as a 211 km access road that would connect the port to the consortium's plants. . This means that the hole in the ocean will grow and deepen.

5. Great Blue Hole, Belize.

The world-famous Great Blue Hole is the main attraction of picturesque, ecologically perfectly clean Belize (formerly British Honduras) - a state in Central America, on the Yucatan Peninsula. No, this time it is not a kimberlite pipe. It is not diamonds that are “mined” from it, but tourists - diving enthusiasts from all over the world, thanks to which it feeds the country no worse than a diamond pipe. Probably, it would be better to call it not “Blue Hole”, but “Blue Dream”, since this can only be seen in dreams or in a dream. This is a true masterpiece, a miracle of nature - a perfectly round, twilight blue spot in the middle Caribbean Sea, surrounded by a lace bib of the Lighthouse Reef atol.

View from space!

Width 400 meters, depth 145 - 160 meters.

It’s like they’re swimming over an abyss...

6. Drainage hole in the reservoir of the Monticello Dam.

A large man-made hole is located in Northern California, USA. But this is not just a hole. The drainage hole in the Monticello Dam reservoir is the largest spillway in the world! It was built about 55 years ago. This funnel-shaped exit is simply irreplaceable here. It allows you to quickly release excess water from the tank when its level exceeds permissible norm. A kind of safety valve.

Visually, the funnel looks like a giant concrete pipe. It is capable of passing through itself as much as 1370 cubic meters per second. m of water! The depth of this hole is about 21 m. From top to bottom it has the shape of a cone, the diameter of which at the top reaches almost 22 m, and at the bottom it narrows to 9 m and comes out on the other side of the dam, removing excess water when the reservoir overflows. The distance from the pipe to the exit point, which is located slightly to the south, is approximately 700 feet (about 200 m).

7. Karst sinkhole in Guatemala.

A giant funnel with a depth of 150 and a diameter of 20 meters. Called groundwater and rain. During the formation of the sinkhole, several people died and a dozen houses were destroyed. According to local residents, from about the beginning of February, soil movements were felt in the area of the future tragedy, and a muffled rumble was heard from underground.

Career(cut) - a set of excavations in the earth’s crust formed during open-pit mining of minerals; open-pit mining enterprise.
In a broad sense, a quarry is a huge excavation earth's surface well. Quarries are formed when rock is removed from the ground in huge or crushed pieces, and they come in different forms.

The principle of open-pit mining is that the thicker layers of waste rock located on top, covering the mineral deposit, are divided into horizontal layers within the mining allotment, which are removed sequentially in the direction from top to bottom, with the lower layers ahead of the upper ones. The height of the ledge depends on the strength of the rocks and the technology used, and ranges from several meters to several tens of meters.

The bottom of the quarry is the area of the lower ledge of the quarry (also called the bottom of the quarry). In conditions of development of steep and inclined mineral bodies, the minimum dimensions of the quarry bottom are determined taking into account the conditions for safe removal and loading rocks from the last ledge: in width - not less than 20 m, in length - not less than 50-100 m.

In conditions of development of morphologically complex deposits of significant extension, the bottom of the quarry may have a stepped shape.

The depth of a quarry is the vertical distance between the level of the earth's surface and the bottom of the quarry, or the distance from the upper contour of the quarry to the lower. There are design, final and maximum pit depths.

The quarry is a system of ledges (usually the upper ones are rock or overburden, the lower ones are mining), which are constantly moving, ensuring the excavation of rock mass within the contours of the quarry field.

Explosions

One of the methods of extracting rock from a quarry is explosion. For explosion, wells are drilled to a given depth using a drilling machine. The diameter of the wells can be different, depending on the composition of the stone. The well grid (distance between wells) can also be different. Wells are usually drilled in advance and then covered with bags to prevent water or small stones from getting in before work begins. Lay out the components: a bag of explosives and a detonator. Then the detonators are connected and lowered down. The cable is tied so that it does not “go” down.

The well is charged with explosives. As work progresses, the level of explosive in the well is measured.

After charging, a plug is made in the well from the rock that remains after drilling the well.
The stopper is needed to lock the explosion products so that they do not “fly” up out of the well, and so that the explosion goes along the shortest route not up, but to the side.

Finish the work, connect the wires into a garland. Check the circuit for breaks.

A warning signal is given before the explosion. All equipment from the quarry is removed to a safe distance from the explosion point, people hide in cover, and an explosion occurs. After the explosion, a signal is given indicating the end of the blasting work.

Types of quarries

Career

Careers are:

diamond;
copper;
coal and others.

Quarry products

Granite and rubble stones are mined and produced in granite quarries.

In quartzite quarries: quartzite crushed stone, quartzite screenings.

In sand quarries: construction sand, gully sand, quarry sand.

In limestone quarries: limestone crushed stone, limestone flour, gypsum crushed stone.

In andesite quarries: andesite, rubble stone, finely split rubble stone.

At the marble quarry: marble chips, marble sand, marble flour, rubble stone.

In block quarries: granite blocks, granite slabs, gabbro blocks, paving stones.

In perlite quarries: crushed perlite, sand, perlite stone, expanded perlite.

In zeolite quarries: zeolite crushed stone, crushed natural zeolite.

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Video of granite quarry

When using such concepts as “mine”, “mine” and “mine”, there is usually no difficulty in determining whether an object belongs to the extraction of a type of natural resource. What is a quarry? Is this also an artificial industrial facility or is it still a natural depression?

Definition

A quarry is an artificially formed excavation in the surface earth's crust for the extraction of the underlying layer of natural resources using the open sampling method. As a rule, it has a funnel shape, tapering downwards. The territory is limited by the formed planes. At the initial stage of development, the top layer of soil is removed and moved outside the mining zone.

The concept of "quarry" arose from borrowed from French the word carriere, which was used to designate places where natural stone was quarried and processed. It can also be used to highlight the specialization of an enterprise whose activities are related to open-pit mining of natural resources.

Varieties

Excavation using a closed method without removing the top layer is usually called a mine. In open-pit coal mining, the term open pit is used. When mining minerals to extract metal ores and crystals, the concept of a mine (mine) is more often used.

In all cases, we can say that a quarry is an open-pit mine for industrial sampling of rock that lies at depth. Depending on the deposit, it can be sand, clay, gravel, limestone. Extraction of fossil fuels is carried out in peat, shale, and coal quarries. For chemical industry make samples to extract phosphites, apatites, sulfur, arsenic and other salts from the bowels of the planet. Non-metallic materials include quarries for the extraction of alabaster, talc, and mica.

Metals are extracted from ore. Its extraction is most often also carried out using the quarry method. This is how raw materials are extracted for the production of ferrous metals (iron, manganese, chromium) and non-ferrous metals (copper, zinc, tin). The same principle is used to sample ores of noble, radioactive and rare earth metals. A mining and processing plant is usually built near such deposits.

Granite mining

The method of opening depends on the nature of the deposit. Typically a vertical trench is used, directed into the excavation. The peculiarity of the quarries is that the material is used to make facing stones and blocks. The main task is to ensure maximum safety of the monolith of extracted blocks.

Granite has the property of splitting along the plane of the rock. This feature is used in wedge mining. Several technological methods are used. The simplest is drilling a well and then planting explosives. During blasting, the rock is exposed. Large pieces are used for cutting slabs. The disadvantage of this method is the large amount of waste that goes into crushed stone. In large parts, the likelihood of microcracks, which will appear during processing, increases. A more gentle method is pumping compressed air into the borehole, which leads to formation cracking.

Granite quarries at the preparation stage during field development are cheaper than marble ones. But during the production process, due to complex technology, the cost of production increases. The best results in terms of product quality are obtained by cutting the rock layer directly into blocks. But this option is the most expensive.

Intensive construction requires a lot of concrete. Sand is an indispensable component in its composition. The presence of deposits of this material at shallow depths in close proximity to the city limits has a positive effect on construction costs. When assessing a deposit, it is taken into account chemical composition(SiO 2 content), presence of impurities, fire resistance, rock structure, its physical and mechanical properties.

The shallow depth of the deposit makes it possible to open the deposit using wheeled equipment: scrapers, bulldozers. Sampling is carried out by draglines, multi-bucket excavators, and transportation is carried out by by road transport. A sand quarry is a relatively shallow excavation (up to 15 m). The peculiarity is that the material is free-flowing. It is not possible to ensure the stability of frontal dumps due to the danger of collapses. Another feature is the likelihood of flooding groundwater, which involves their diversion or the use of “wet” mining technology.

Coal quarry

Sand quarry

The coal mine is called coal mine .

Story

Open pit mining is known from the Paleolithic era. The first large quarries appeared in connection with construction in Ancient Egypt pyramids Later, in the ancient world, marble was mined in quarries on a large scale. The expansion of the scope of application of the open-pit mining method using quarries continued until the beginning. XX century, due to the lack of highly productive machines for removing and moving large volumes of overburden. At the end of the 20th century, 95% of building rocks, more than 70% of ores, 90% of brown and 20% of coal.

The main explosives used in quarrying in the Soviet Union in the 1920s were ammonal and ammonites, in the 1930s - dynamons, during the Great Patriotic War - oxyliquites and ammonites, and from 1956 to the 1960s - igdanite.

Quarry elements

Quarry bottom

The bottom of the quarry is the area of the lower ledge of the quarry (also called the bottom of the quarry). In the conditions of development of steep and inclined mineral bodies, the minimum dimensions of the quarry bottom are determined taking into account the conditions for the safe removal and loading of rocks from the last ledge: in width - not less than 20 m, in length - not less than 50-100 m [ ] .

In conditions of development of morphologically complex deposits of significant extension, the bottom of the quarry may have a stepped shape.

Pit depth

The depth of the quarry is the vertical distance between the level of the earth's surface and the bottom of the quarry or the distance from the upper contour of the quarry to the lower one. There are design, final and maximum depths of the quarry [ ] .

The deepest quarries in the world reach a depth of almost 1 km. The deepest quarry is Bingham Canyon (Utah, USA), the Chuquicamata quarry (Chile) has a depth of more than 850 m.

Limit contour of the quarry

The limiting contour of a quarry is the contour of a quarry for the period of its repayment, that is, the cessation of work on the extraction of minerals and stripping [ ] .

Technology and organization of work in the quarry

The rock mass is moved various types transport. Transport connections in the quarry are provided by permanent or sliding ramps, and with the surface - by trenches. During operation, the working benches move, resulting in an increase in mined-out space. During stripping operations, the overburden is moved to dumps, which are sometimes placed in the goaf. With a quarry depth of up to 100 m with strong containing rocks, in the cost of 1 m³ of overburden, up to 25-30% is occupied by drilling and blasting operations, 12-16% by excavation, 35-40% by transport and 10-15% by the construction of the quarry itself. As the depth of the quarry increases, the portion of transport costs increases to 60-70%.

Quarry working area

The working area of a quarry is the area in which stripping and mining operations are carried out. It is characterized by a set of overburden and mining benches that are simultaneously in operation. The position of the working area is determined by the elevations of the working benches and the length of their work front. The working zone is a surface that moves and changes over time, within which work on the preparation and excavation of rock mass is carried out. It can cover one, two or all sides of the quarry. During the construction of a quarry, the working zone, as a rule, includes only overburden benches, and by the end of capital mining work - also mining benches. The number of stripping, mining and mining faces in the working area cannot be set arbitrarily, since the implementation of plans for individual types of work depends on this. In the working area of the quarry, each excavator during operation occupies a certain horizontal area, which is characterized by the width of the working platform and the length of the excavator block.

When developing horizontal and flat deposits of small and medium thickness, the altitude position of the working area of the quarry remains unchanged. When developing inclined and steep deposits, as well as thick isometric deposits, the working area gradually decreases along with an increase in the depth of the quarry.

Advancement of work in the quarry

The advancement of work in a quarry is one of the indicators of the intensity of field development. The advancement of the work front in a quarry is characterized by speed, that is, the distance of movement of the mining work front, expressed in meters per unit of time (for the most part - per year). The speed depends on the scale of the work, the type and design of the loading and transport equipment that is used, the method of moving the mining front and the height of the benches that are being mined. There are fan-shaped, equilateral and mixed advances of the work front in a quarry.

Fan advance - movement of the front of mining operations when developing a quarry field (or part of it) of a rounded shape, which is characterized by a higher speed of advance of sections of the front separated from the turning point (movement of the front in a “fan”, “fan-like” plan).

The most ancient, but still relevant to this day, mining technology is open-pit mining. Already in Ancient Egypt they knew what a quarry was, and the first open-pit mine workings are known to us from the Paleolithic era. In the ancient world, a similar technology was used to extract marble. Greatest success at the same time, the builders of Ancient Greece reached.

Until the 20th century, this method of extracting sand, marble, stone, coal, chalk, limestone and others building materials was the leading one in the world. This is due to the lack of high-performance equipment for opening the upper layers of the lithosphere and removing mineral deposits directly. The relevance of quarries has remained to this day, but the share of their participation in the mining industry has decreased somewhat.

Advantages of quarries

In order to understand what a quarry is, you need to get acquainted with the open-pit mining method. The essence of this method is that resources are extracted directly from the surface of the earth by opening the upper layers of the lithosphere. And the collection of mine workings or enterprises is called a quarry.

Quarrying has a number of advantages compared to obtaining minerals underground:

High degree of security.
More comfortable conditions for workers.
Ease of organization of work.
Short construction time.
Low capital investment.
More complete resource extraction.

But what does this quarry not allow to once again become the main place of mining? The main factor can be called a decrease in economic benefits: the longer the earth's surface is mined, the deeper the quarry becomes, which increases the cost of delivering material to processing plants. At this stage of development of the mining industry, this is the main barrier to the development of open-pit mining.

Basic elements of a quarry

The easiest way to imagine a quarry is in the form of a cone, the top of which is immersed in the earth's surface. Inside such a “cone” you can see spiral ramps that are formed by ledges. The main elements that can characterize any quarry, be it a stone or a sand quarry, are:

The bottom of the quarry is the surface of the lower ledge, which is also called the bottom. If morphologically complex and extended rocks are being mined, the bottom may have a stepped structure.
Pit depth is the distance of the top cut to the lowest point of the mining operation. This value can reach 1000 meters.
Maximum depth - the maximum distance from the top edge to the bottom contour at which mining is economically feasible.
Limit contour - the contour of the quarry for the period of its closure due to low economic efficiency.

The main element, without which it is impossible to imagine what a quarry is, is a ledge. Its main characteristics - height, angle of repose, dimensions of the upper and lower working platform - depend on the massiveness and value of the rocks being mined.

Extraction technology

Open-pit mining is carried out by two types of work - stripping and mining. At the first stage, the earth's surface is "opened" - top layer lithospheres are cut off and a pit is dug, thereby opening access to minerals. Then they begin directly to extract resources.

As the layers of “earthly wealth” are mined, the diameter and depth of the quarry increase, and the working ledges move from the center to the edges. Obtaining almost any type of resource involves drilling and blasting. Depending on the local conditions, their share can be 25-30% of the cost of the extracted material.

Economic efficiency

Mining marble, limestone rocks, creating any mine workings open type, including the sand quarry, are seeking to reduce costs. For this purpose, rotary excavators and heavy-duty vehicles are used: mainly BELAZ vehicles, which reduces transportation costs.

Often, the open-pit method of mining underground resources is used to produce coal. At the same time, it is possible to reduce the costs associated with delivery directly to consumers, which makes it accessible to the general population. In addition, the open-pit method of coal mining is the safest, but the quality of the raw materials leaves much to be desired due to the availability large quantity impurities.

The influence of quarries on the environmental situation

Quarrying has negative impact on environmental situation developed area. Firstly, the top fertile layer of the earth is completely destroyed, which subsequently cannot be restored. Secondly, the hydrogeological conditions of the site and the terrain change significantly.

Thirdly, the land allocation area is polluted by generated waste and wastewater. In addition, one cannot ignore the noise impact on environment, as well as the release of large amounts carbon monoxide. Similar negative effects are observed when both a granite quarry and any other open-pit mine are created.