A preliminary analysis of the mining-induced rock movement characteristics in the Xinli deposit of the Sanshandao gold mine

Abstract

Commensurate with economic globalization, the demand for mineral resources is increasing. With increased mining activity, problems related to ground subsidence and rock movement are becoming increasingly prominent, even affecting mining production activities. However, the physical mechanisms behind the ground subsidence phenomenon have been poorly studied, especially for metal mines with a steep dip. This paper applies the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique and the numerical simulation method to deduce the characteristics of rock movement in the Xinli deposit of the steeply inclined Sanshandao gold mine. The InSAR results indicate that more subsidence has occurred in the southern part of the Xinli Village coastline area than in the northern part. This is also supported by the numerical simulation results obtained by the fast Lagrangian analysis of continua in three dimensions (FLAC3D). Notably, the range of ground subsidence obtained by numerical simulation shows an obvious asymmetry. The monitoring data of the No. 55 prospecting profile offer a plausible explanation for this, as the surrounding rock of the fault’s hanging wall has a wider range of rock movements. Furthermore, the sublevels of the No. 55 prospecting profile at different depths show different rock movement characteristics, and a logistic function can be well applied to the right part of the settlement curve; the parameter “a” in the function formula is very close to the maximum subsidence value for each sublevel. We defined the ratio “r” to measure the difference between the maximum subsidence value and the corresponding parameter “a” and found this value to be positively correlated with the fractal dimension value of deeper sublevels (−320 m, −400 m, −480 m, and −600 m) and negatively correlated with the fractal dimension value of lower sublevels (−200 m and −240 m).