Meeting Future Mineral Resource Demand by Ult ra-Deep Mining

摘要

Deep underground mines, more than 2500 m below surface, are challenged to develop the technologies required to deliver the metals that the industrial economy requires to support a growing global population. A population of nine billion will certainly strain our agricultural and transportation capacity, but it is the total resource demand of the firstworld life that threatens to out-strip the resources of the entire planet. The problems that mining face are increasingly complex requiring an in-depth understanding of topics like thermodynamics, tensor analysis and advanced computation consequently, to get much better at moving millions of tonnes of ore every day in thousands of mines around the world, mining needs a lot more physics and the involvement of many more physicists.