Sublevel caving – past and future / Подэтажное обрушение - прошлое и будущее

The paper reviews the historical development of sublevel caving and presents some ideas concerning its future application and development. The "Present" status is not covered since it will be the topic of a number of other papers offered at the conference. The sublevel caving technique evolved out of top-slicing in the early part of the 20th century. Block caving was a natural outgrowth of sublevel caving. Further development of sublevel caving moved very slowly until the early 1950's when the technique blossomed into today's version, largely due to improvements in drilling technology. In addition to being of historical interest, the development path also has significance for the future development of the sublevel caving system. This will be shown. Although the principal application of the method throughout time has been to the extraction of iron ore, this may be about to change. Many large open pit mines are rapidly reaching their final economic depths and sublevel caving is a natural candidate for underground continuation. For mining companies it is natural to consider the largest scale, most modern version of the method. There are both opportunities and concerns regarding the application of large-scale sublevel caving. These will be discussed. Some innovative, and possibly even implementable, design modifications will be presented. <...>