Progress and challenges in some areas of deep mining

Abstract

Deep Mining 2012 is the sixth in a series of international seminars on deep and high stress mining which began with a seminar held in Perth in November 2002, almost a decade ago. The early announcements for this seminar listed 10 seminar themes. This paper seeks to make contributions to the discussion of progress made in four of these themes – geomechanics risks, risk assessment and management, rock behaviour under high stress, and numerical modelling – largely, but not only, through a review of the papers published in the proceedings of the five previous seminars. Particular emphasis is placed on the risks associated with the new generation of block and panel caving operations or ‘super caves’. Some remaining challenges in the four theme areas discussed are also identified.