Mineral resources. From exploration to sustainability assessment / Минеральные ресурсы. От разведки до оценки устойчивости

It is necessary to define some fundamental terms that will provide indispensable background for the entire book. The first term to be explained deals with the title of the book: mineral resources. A mineral resource can be defined broadly as the concentration of material of economic interest in or on the Earth’s crust. In this book, it includes solid earth materials such as metals (i.e., copper, gold, iron), industrial minerals (e.g., fluorite, quartz), and rocks (e.g., limestone, sand, gravel). The reason to introduce the word solid is that some fuel resources, mainly oil and gas, are not solid materials, and their mining cycle (see 7 Sect. 1.3) is completely different from other raw materials cited. This restriction is not valid for fuel resources that are solid ones (e.g., coal, tar sands, and bituminous shales) and whose exploration, evaluation, exploitation, mineral processing, and reclamation stages present similar guidelines that those involved for metals or industrial minerals and rocks. This more restricted view of the term, excluding nonsolid fuel resources, is the most commonly used in the field of mineral resources. World mining also includes many other common terms such as mineral, mineral deposit, ore, gangue, waste, prospect, commodity (fairly similar to mineral raw material), and much more. Some, but not all, used terms are defined because the list cannot be obviously exhaustive, and this book is not a mining dictionary. In this sense, many mining dictionaries can be downloaded from Internet web pages <...>