Chapter 13 - Mineral and Rock Resources Flashcards
What are known as reserves?
They are the quantity of a given geological material that has been found and that can be recovered economically with existing technology.
What is known as cumulative reserves?
They include the quantity of the material already used up in addition to the remaining reserves.
What is known as subeconomic resources/ conditional resources?
They are deposits that have already been found but that can not presently be profitably exploited.
What are known as hypothetical resources?
They are additional deposits expected to be found in areas in which some deposits of the material of interest have already been found.
What are known as speculative resources?
They are those deposits that might be found in explored or unexplored regions where deposits of the materials are not already known to occur.
What is an ore?
It is a rock in which a valuable or useful metal occurs at a concentration sufficiently high, relative to average rocks, that it might be economically worth mining.
What is the concentration factor?
It is a way of describing an ore deposit in terms of enrichment.
What is a pegmatite?
It is the term given to unusually coarse-grained igneous intrusions.
How are hydrothermal ore deposits created?
It is when warm fluids leach additional metals from the rocks through which they pass. The fluids cool and deposit their dissolved minerals.
What is a banded iron formation?
Layered sedimentary iron ores. (example of sedimentary deposits)
How are evaporites formed and what are they?
They are a type of mineral deposit formed when a body of seawater is trapped in a shallow sea and dries up leaving behind previously dissolved material.
What are placers?
They are deposits that are mechanically concentrated by water, they are typically weathered out of local rocks, then transported, sorted, and concentrated.
What does remote sensing rely on?
It relies on detection, recording, and analysis of wave-transmitted energy, such as visible light and infrared radiation, rather than on direct physical contact and sampling.
What are manganese nodules?
They are the most widespread undersea mineral resource, they are usually about 10 cm in diameter, and are composed mostly of manganese minerals.
What are spoil banks?
It is the waste resulting from mining activity that is regularly dumped back, they commonly cause pollution.
