Earth Resources Exploitation and Sustainable Development: Geological and Engineering Perspectives

Earth resources are the essential basis for an economy of a country and well-being of her citizens. Their exploitation is a key factor in economic growth and development of the nation, but one that can have serious negative environmental and socio-economic impacts. Therefore it is important to understand their origin/occurrence and exploitation in terms of environmental sustainability. The human society has profited from exploitation of earth resources, precisely when energy use became much more efficient during the industrial era. Some of these earth resources (renewable and non-renewable) are oil and gas, coal, water, metal ore, wind, air etc. and their methods of exploitation are surface and subsurface mining methods [1]. Thus the geological perspectives of earth resources refer to origin and occurrence of these earth resources while the engineering perspectives refer to the processes involved in the extraction (mining), processing and utilization of the resources. To fulfill the requirement of sustainable development, the efficiency with which resources are utilized has to be improved. The main concerns associated with earth resources, therefore, are generally the costs and environmental impacts of extracting, transporting, and refining them. The economics of earth resources deals with the supply, demand and allocation of the resources.

Liangshan Rare Earth Resources Reserve Ranks Second Nationwide

As early as on February 7,2014,the National Development and Reform Commission reviewed and formally approved to set up Panxi Strategic Resource Innovation Development Pilot Zone.Since its rare earth resource reserve ranked second nationwide,a number of counties and districts in Liangshan Prefecture are incorporated into the Pilot Zone,and become core components of this Pilot Zone.

Analysis on the deployment of mining research supported by the grant program of Deep Resources Exploration and Mining

The Deep Resources Exploration and Mining(DREAM)grant program,within the framework of The National Key Research and Development Program grants,is a pillar to implement China’s science and technology strategy in the area of deep resources exploitation.To tackle the insufficient of theories and technologies for the 1000-meter-deep mining,a section of mining,covering the research of basic theories,general technologies and application demonstration,was arranged in the layout of DREAM under the principle of"whole chain design,integrated implementation".In the aspect of basic research,DREAM mainly focused on the deep rock mechanics and mining theory,such as the in-situ mechanical behavior of deep rock,deep high stress induction and energy regulation theory.For the general and key technologies,DREAM supported the research on the mine construction and hoisting,excavation,rock breaking,mining methods and mining safety according to the characteristics of coal and metal mines.For the demonstration application,taking green,safe and efficient as the starting point,DREAM aimed at the green,safe and high efficiency mining,and the demonstration and leading role projects such as the low-waste and high-efficiency back fill mining.Since 2016,10 R&D projects have been funded,and 122 institutional participants with a total budget of RMB 235 million from the central government and RMB 480 million from enterprises as well as local governments have been involved.It is expected that the mining section of DREAM would contribute to establishing the theory and technology system in the area of deep mining and promoting the ability of deep resource exploitation in China.

Monitoring Dynamic Change of Land Cover Based on SVM and Satellite Images in Hanoi,Vietnam

An integral method,combining support vector ma-chine (SVM) with remote-sensing analysis techniques,was ex-plored to monitor Hanoi’s dynamic change of land cover. The landsat thematic mapper (TM) image in 1993,the enhanced the-matic mapper plus (ETM+) image in 2000,and the image with the charge-coupled device camera (CCD) on the China-Brazil earth resources satellite (CBERS) in 2008 were used. Six land-cover types,including built-up areas,woodland,cropland,sand,water body and unused land,were identified. The detected results showed visually the rapid urban expansion as well as land-cover change of Hanoi from 1993 to 2008. There were 12 637.54 hm2 cropland de-creased between 1993 and 2000,and 8 227.6 hm2 cropland de-creased between 2000 and 2008. Compared with cropland,wood-land firstly decreased and then increased,and the other types did not change significantly. The results indicate that CBERS dataset has the application potential in world resources researches.