Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shoku]

I've been trying to look around the internet to figure out how mining has been done historically but the information seems really sparse, or perhaps hidden away in unnamed heavy tomes in libraries somewhere.

There are plenty of videos for super digging machines but I'm more interested in the space people mine out.
Now with what I have found the old handworked mines seem to just be two tunnels intersect in some hillside.
With the heavy modern machinery our coal mining is done as a big flat room with a lot of pillars or support wall structures until they mine out the area and they can then mine those out from the back and let the rock collapse to refill the space.
The only multilevel design I could find had some undescribed mining pattern up top with a lot of shafts for dumping the material down into mine carts.

Wikipedia goes through a few other modern methods but doesn't have a whole lot more about these kinds of tunnel formations.
I have this mental picture of a mine where the miners ride down a shaft in an elevator. This seems to have been in a lot of movies so I would imagine it had some basis in reality. I hoped to see cross section images and maps of actual mines but I just can't find any of that.

Anyone knowledgeable about this?

[Agdune]

I remember finding a well-detailed image once, oriented towards common OHS issues in a modern mine... but I have no idea where I found it (my sister used to work at a company which built ore excavators and other heavy mining equipment though, so it might've been on the wall of those offices, come to think of it)

That said, in finding that poor quality little image, I found this simple pic. I imagine this one to be what most of my dwarf fortress mines look like, since my masons are always too busy to clear away rubble or smooth stone:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Vector]

Read Emile Zola's Germinal.  It's primarily the usual thing about how workers are dying, but it is an extremely well-researched novel that gave me an interesting picture of the entire operation.

Hope that helps a bit =)

[MonkeyHead]

Come hang round in Wales - Mining is one of OUR things....

http://www.welshmines.org/links/l_rschr.htm

[Eagleon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_and_metallurgy_in_medieval_Europe This might help some. It's very positive-biased, in the sense that it omits the most obvious factor for mining innovation. It was much cheaper just to make miners wade in spaces than to implement a water-wheel pump. Ore has never been that valuable, even during peak demand. Improvements to a mine were done grudgingly and sporadically - usually they were horrifically cramped, and there wasn't a lot of thought put to stability. The exceptions are more productive mines, which actually had room for carts, and of course, these are the ones that are more extensively studied by historians.

[Shoku]

I followed the rabbit hole to roman deep vein mining
http://www.unc.edu/~duncan/personal/roman_mining/deep-vein_mining.htm

This actually tells me a whole lot of the basics, though I guess I'd need to know the geology of mineral deposits to understand how the galleries come off of the shaft.

The Welsh resource I can't really navigate. I run into a lot of abstracts I guess but can't tell what goes where really.

[RedKing]

In b4 mIrAcLeS...

Seriously though, there's no one "standard" mine. Mines vary based on a number of factors such as:

• What you're mining for
• What kind of rock you're mining through
• The level of technology available to you
• Presence of groundwater

But there are a few common problems that all mines have to deal with -- ventilation, lighting, heating/cooling, bracing, and transportation of miners, ore *and* spall.

Elevators/manual lifts are used in some larger mines, but the earliest mines were basically just natural caves that were enlarged and deepened by guys chipping away at the rock with hammers and picks. With other people carrying the chunks of rock and ore out of the cave, kinda like DF.

Mining in sedimentary rock is both the easiest and hardest. Easiest in that the rock breaks easier than digging through basalt or granite, but hardest in that there are many more complications to deal with. Aquifiers, pockets of natural gas, salt domes (although in ancient times, salt domes were often what they were mining for), cave-ins are more likely etc.

Metamorphic rock is the hardest on the miners and the easiest on the engineer. These would typically be gem mines or marble quarries. Although a quarry is rather different in that it's basically an open-air pit mine. Because you're trying to get the rock itself out, and you want it in big, controlled chunks rather than shattered spall.

[Shoku]

Well yeah but I've tried looking for layouts for particular materials but there's still nothing showing me any of them. I can sort of imagine the galleries following some veins of ore and aiming at where they think there's more but I've got no idea how they handled sheets of material. I'd expect the old clay mines were dealing with something like that but I don't know how they'd aim galleries through that, or if they'd make anything wide for it, etc.

[RedKing]

Clay and marble were usually quarried rather than mined. (That is, they just dug the entire top of the site off and then dug a pit down into the material.)

Coal mining is a good example of underground digging with a mostly horizontal orebody. Google "longwall mining" to get some diagrams on one way that works.

Also the Wikipedia article on underground mining is pretty good and has several diagrams of different techniques and mine features.

[counting]

I got some historical date with how Chinese ancient mine working which can date back to 12th century B.C. But it will be a lot of work to translate them. I will make a short brief with one of them. A famous one is Aeruginous Mountain ancient copper mine at Daye County, Hubei Province. It's a deep mine into the mountain, and it's not just produce copper, but iron, cobalt, gold and silver.

They used shaft, level shaft(gallery), blind shaft, and inclined shaft. It also used a kind of tool to determine what rich the mineral is at that point. (washing/flowing the ore down with water to check). And using premade wooden structure to support the shaft/drift. (60cm x 60cm to 110cm or 130cm). And using pulley to lift the raw ore. And there are some blind shaft was used to collect the excessive underground water or rains. And dumping shaft to fill the useless rocks/leftover. There are theories that it either dig from the side of the hill and then dig down, or dig down then branched out with levels of galleries.

And when the ore is transferred to the surface, it will be melt right away into ingot or processed minerals before transporting else where.

http://203.68.243.199/cpedia/Content.asp?ID=69486

[Tellemurius]

Well, due to geology training i can map out veins for minerals, most of the damn work was blasting and knocking on the walls to hear any echoing in the walls.

so what do you need?

[RedKing]

Heh...I had to look up "Aeruginous"...never knew that was a word. I'm assuming that's Tonglushan? Better translation might be "Green Copper Mountain" (it's referring to verdigris, the greenish patina that forms on copper. Think Statue of Liberty.)

To be honest, prior to the industrial age and the steam engine, mines just weren't very extensive. It took a tremendous amount of man-hours to cut into a mountain, and the technology and engineering hadn't developed to allow bracing of tunnels that went very deep (either horizontally or vertically). Most mines were enlarged natural caves, or were relatively shallow by modern methods. You have to remember that this was an age before geology as a science or ground-penetrating radar or any of that sort of thing. If there was a mine, it was because somebody could tell from the surface that there was something work digging out. Which meant at least part of the vein was shallow or even exposed. And often it was more effective to strip mine/quarry it out rather than messing about with tunnels.

[counting]

Heh...I had to look up "Aeruginous"...never knew that was a word. I'm assuming that's Tonglushan? Better translation might be "Green Copper Mountain" (it's referring to verdigris, the greenish patina that forms on copper. Think Statue of Liberty.)

To be honest, prior to the industrial age and the steam engine, mines just weren't very extensive. It took a tremendous amount of man-hours to cut into a mountain, and the technology and engineering hadn't developed to allow bracing of tunnels that went very deep (either horizontally or vertically). Most mines were enlarged natural caves, or were relatively shallow by modern methods. You have to remember that this was an age before geology as a science or ground-penetrating radar or any of that sort of thing. If there was a mine, it was because somebody could tell from the surface that there was something work digging out. Which meant at least part of the vein was shallow or even exposed. And often it was more effective to strip mine/quarry it out rather than messing about with tunnels.

I used a dictionary to translate the color. I don't use green copper because it's not just a copper mine. (There might be a confusion.) And I am quite tired right now to translate manually.

And I visited the museum, and IIRC it said that it can go below water table, and reach 30 to 50 meters deep. And already nearly 100 shafts are excavated. There is physical demo / models too. (vertical shafts, and many more galleries, blind shaft). And I guess since it's such a rich mine that once someone accidentally happen to discover a large quantity of ores in shallow ground. It's naturally to dig deeper and deeper. And regarding it as being dug for thousands of years and still a rich mine, I think it's worth the risk of digging it deep into the mountain. The surrounding area are still being mined till today.

[Shoku]

Clay and marble were usually quarried rather than mined. (That is, they just dug the entire top of the site off and then dug a pit down into the material.)

Coal mining is a good example of underground digging with a mostly horizontal orebody. Google "longwall mining" to get some diagrams on one way that works.

Also the Wikipedia article on underground mining is pretty good and has several diagrams of different techniques and mine features.

Well actually one of the links here (probably my one about roman mining) mentioned clay mining. The galleries were smaller so miners had to lay on their backs to dig.

Longwall mining gave some better results but I'm going to need awhile to sort through the terminology.

I got some historical date with how Chinese ancient mine working which can date back to 12th century B.C. But it will be a lot of work to translate them. I will make a short brief with one of them. A famous one is Aeruginous Mountain ancient copper mine at Daye County, Hubei Province. It's a deep mine into the mountain, and it's not just produce copper, but iron, cobalt, gold and silver.

They used shaft, level shaft(gallery), blind shaft, and inclined shaft. It also used a kind of tool to determine what rich the mineral is at that point. (washing/flowing the ore down with water to check). And using premade wooden structure to support the shaft/drift. (60cm x 60cm to 110cm or 130cm). And using pulley to lift the raw ore. And there are some blind shaft was used to collect the excessive underground water or rains. And dumping shaft to fill the useless rocks/leftover. There are theories that it either dig from the side of the hill and then dig down, or dig down then branched out with levels of galleries.

And when the ore is transferred to the surface, it will be melt right away into ingot or processed minerals before transporting else where.

http://203.68.243.199/cpedia/Content.asp?ID=69486

What is a blind shaft? All my searches just turn up some movie.

Well, due to geology training i can map out veins for minerals, most of the damn work was blasting and knocking on the walls to hear any echoing in the walls.

so what do you need?

Well I haven't actually seen any explicit description of how a gallery runs through veins. If there is evidence of several veins of desired material do you send out shafts after each one? Mine one out then start a shaft at whatever point is close to the next? Send out numerous shafts in parallel? Judging by longwall mining people don't ever quite do a grid but if I interpreted the pictures correctly they like to make two galleries next to each other (one way traffic?) with periodic access punched between them.

It seems at least that they never mined completely blind but aside from retreat mining how do you get at material that's past the walls of the gallery? I assume that making them too wide risks a collapse and obviously there are at least some materials distributed in a way that's wider than you would want to make the gallery.

Heh...I had to look up "Aeruginous"...never knew that was a word. I'm assuming that's Tonglushan? Better translation might be "Green Copper Mountain" (it's referring to verdigris, the greenish patina that forms on copper. Think Statue of Liberty.)

To be honest, prior to the industrial age and the steam engine, mines just weren't very extensive. It took a tremendous amount of man-hours to cut into a mountain, and the technology and engineering hadn't developed to allow bracing of tunnels that went very deep (either horizontally or vertically). Most mines were enlarged natural caves, or were relatively shallow by modern methods. You have to remember that this was an age before geology as a science or ground-penetrating radar or any of that sort of thing. If there was a mine, it was because somebody could tell from the surface that there was something work digging out. Which meant at least part of the vein was shallow or even exposed. And often it was more effective to strip mine/quarry it out rather than messing about with tunnels.

That's part of why I don't want to base my perception of old mines on things like the wikipedia articles about coal mining.

So like one shaft and one or two galleries going off of it about as far as you could expect a line of dudes to hand off buckets of water, whether or not water was actually an issue in that particular mine? I read that a few went on for a kilometer or more but I don't know if that's just one gallery now why they wouldn't branch it or if there are particular distances they'd want to keep between galleries in less sturdy rock.

The article about Medieval mining says that around 1200 or so a lot of the shallow mines dried up so they started putting more effort into getting below the water table and such. Were these mines more extensive at all or just kind of the same thing but into areas with difficult water and circulation conditions?

[counting]

About 3 kinds of major mining methods in ancient Chinese mine (Actually modern mine still used these naming method).

Vertical shaft + galleries


Inclined shaft + galleries


level shaft (adit) + "blind shaft"

A mine uses the combination of all these three techniques to form a complex. And the dark area is where the targeted minerals deposit/vain.

And Aeruginous Mountain ancient mine (or Copper Green Mountain, or Tonglushan as direct verbal transcription) is a massive mine with surface area discovered so far 2km x 1km. And it dug deep below local water table. With hundreds of different kind of shafts. The later period at B.C.E. in ancient Hang Dynasty is about the same time as Roman Republic, the earliest one can date back to 12 century B.C. in Shang Dynasty. And it particularly mentions about the solution of water gathering with trenches on the floor of galleries and gather them using gravity to a blind shaft or simple dead end vertical shaft as a filling shaft. And it used some techniques to solve the air ventilation problem. (Something about different natural air pressure. I do not quite understand the details). The depth of a vertical shaft can go as deep as 60 meter, and several vertical shafts with many galleries surrounding and connecting them can form a connected system. (I am curious about how they were able to connect different vertical shafts underground. Some impressive engineering.)

Some video to demonstrate some of the structure I mentioned. But it's in Chinese.
http://elearning.npm.gov.tw/courses/digital_2-4-1/course10/10_2b_0.htm
http://elearning.npm.gov.tw/courses/digital_2-4-1/course10/

I roughly translate the 10_2b_0 section. At the beginning of the film, there is purple flowers at the foreground it's called copper grass flower grows where mineral is rich. And the description said, copper ore can be found at shallow depth, so it's easy to strip mind in open field. When the shallow mineral deplete then dug deeper shafts into the earth. And it's the picture of the ancient mine (Tonglushan) on the surface with strip mine.

Second picture : 2 to 3 thousands years ago (where the ancient mine was activate), these shafts used premade supporting structure (made of wood) to ensure safety. And wooden mechanics devices (pulley etc.) were found to help transporting the ore. Then the animation of one of the reconstructed shafts complex structure.

Third : After the ores were mined, miners broke them down into small chucks on site before transport. And they use water flow and gravity to select heavy mineral from dusts and useless rock. And the devices they used. (It's can be used to determine if certain location has rich or poor mineral. it is also part of the system to control underground water flow).