Introduction. In the last ten years throughout the whole world there has been a steady tendency towards mining economic minerals at greater depths which is accompanied both by deterioration in the mining and technical conditions for working deposits and by active development of mine pressure. Of particular importance and significance in this aspect is the large-scale scientific and technical problem of creating safe technologies for working deposits of economic minerals at considerable depths, including unmanned working. It is generally accepted that scientific bases of mining technology are a fundamental knowledge of the geomechanical and physical processes in blocks of Earth around underground workings which occur due to disturbance of the original condition of rock masses by the cavities formed. As numerous full-scale experiments show, the block structure of rock masses, geotectonics, and the seismicity of regions have a considerable effect on the nature and features of the geomechanical and physical processes around underground mine workings. In the light of past achievements in geomechanics, geotectonics, and seismology some connections for these disciplines are clearly developed. Among key points in particular is the discovery of zonal disintegration of rocks around underground workings [1, 2], the variable sign of the reaction of rocks to dynamic effects [3, 4], and also a number of other physical factors [5-9] pointing to the particularly nonlinear behavior of rocks. Mainly these are the existence of an "invariant" ratio of the linear dimensions of rock blocks to the amount of crack opening in the structural hierarchy of rock masses/z~(6) [8],* the process of self-blocking of "composite" materials leading to formation of a cellular structure in the form of a passive core and an active supporting shell [5], and also detection of a new type of low-velocity waves whose elementary carriers are geoblocks of a different hierarchical level and exhibiting rapid dispersal [6, 7]. It is possible to show that there is a profound interconnection between all of these effects which is caused by the existence of the phenomenon of zonal disintegration of rock around underground workings [1] and the alternating sign of rock reactions to dynamic effects [4]. Apart from a desire to illustrate, although partially, this intercormection, a stimulus for this work is the requirement for attributing the curious, in our view, results of comparing the effects which are obtained on the basis of these two discoveries with a number of basic factors from the field of Earth physics and geotectonics recently accumulated by geologists and geophysicists, and which have not so far found any satisfactory explanation from a physical viewpoint. As geological and geophysical factors the authors have in mind mainly the following: 1) the structure of the Gutenberg velocity section of Earth for longitudinal and transverse waves; 2) subdivision of the geological history of Earth into five sections of approximately the same duration (1 billion years): Catarchean, Archean, Aphebian, Riphean, and Phaneroan; 3) separation of 19 tectomagnetic epochs in Earth starting from an age of 3.54 billion years and a final age of 0.093 billion years, with an average period of 170-200 million years; 4) paleoclimatic recurrence; 5) cyclic changes of the overall area of modern continent territories covered by seas;