Mining and Geography

The Mining frontier

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, more than 70 chemical elements and dozens of minerals are currently mined from more than 100 different types of deposits. According to the Raw Materials Group, in 2005, the value of global mining production was approximately $800 billion, with metals accounting for roughly 27% of the total, industrial minerals and diamonds 7%, coal and uranium 52%, and crushed rock 14%. Of the many metals that are currently being mined around the planet, gold, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, and lead production account for more than 80% of all production. These metals are extracted primarily by large international mining corporations operating in numerous countries. In contrast, coal is extracted primarily within countries for domestic consumption and energy production.

Mining is inherently a geographic dilemma because many elements created by geologic processes are unevenly distributed across the Earth. Moreover, concentrations of these elements that humanity has deemed important are often located in remote areas, far away from where they can be refined or will be incorporated into manufactured items. This dilemma forms one of the most important focal points for geographers as they have labored to identify the locations of these resources. Consequently, the frontier for mineral exploration has continually expanded over time. In addition, as new mining activities have been established along this frontier, they have led to the creation of many new social, economic, and political relationships among different places and societies.

Since antiquity, miners have explored and exploited hillsides, streambeds, and subterranean depths in pursuit of the rarest and most valuable minerals, such as gold, silver, copper, and diamonds. During the earliest human civilizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, the frontiers for minerals such as gold, silver, and copper were generally located within the economic and political domains of each society and formed the basis of most international trading networks. By the 15th century, the mining frontier rapidly expanded as the European powers conquered the Western Hemisphere, Southeast Asia, and several parts of Africa. Alongside this expansion of the mining frontier, many European powers also established colonial mining settlements and forced local populations to work in their mines. Since then, a series of discoveries of rich mineral deposits in places such as California, Alaska, Peru, and Central Asia have incorporated ever more remote areas into the mining frontier. Along this frontier, new cities and mining settlements have rapidly appeared, often as part of far-flung empires or as part of growing nation-states.

Mining Technologies

The productive capacity of mining operations is a function of the relative concentration and quantity of a particular element that is being exploited and the technologies used to extract it. Researchers have illustrated that for many millennia, human labor (often in the form of brutal slavery) and rudimentary tools constituted most mining [Page 1912]technologies. Since then, innovations in technologies such as geographic information systems, heavy machinery, and explosives have dramatically increased the productive capacity of large-scale mines and have gradually reduced the role of human labor in extractive activities. These new technologies are critically important because many of the richest and most readily accessible deposits of valuable minerals have been exhausted and because they allow mining companies to extract very small concentrations of elements from very large volumes of earth. As these new types of mining are very expensive, the mining sector has increasingly become dominated by corporations with access to large quantities of capital, the most sophisticated technologies, and global transportation and production systems. Geographers have increasingly focused their attention on these global mining production systems through the use of new spatial technologies as well as research focused on economic globalization, shifting patterns of employment and production, commodity networks, and the spread of large transnational mining corporations to new regions.

...