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The mining industry has been intrigued by the application of computers for many years. In fact, from artificial intelligence systems designed to run “smarter smelters” (see The Northern Miner Magazine…

When you want to ventilate the deepest levels of a mine or when you’re in charge of mining the highest-grade uranium deposit in the world, you’re pretty well limited to one kind of machine to get the …

Over the nex t few years, Canada’s 70 gold producing mines will be joined by at least 10 major new producers and a handful of smaller ones. If gold prices remain high ($530(C) per oz at presstime), th…

Mining companies have been traditionally slow in accepting or adopting new tech nology for predictive maintenance. I helped with the installation of such technology at the first planning and schedulin…

The six platinum group metals (PGMs) are elements that possess unique chemical and physical characteristics. Members of the group have been in high demand by jewellers since their discovery in ancient…

Busy Little Bacteria II: One way to deal with ores which contain gold trapped in the crystal lattice of arsenopyrite is to feed it to microscopic bacteria. These little microbes oxidize the sulphides,…

The size of the winnings has yet to be determined. But at the very least, the McCoy/Cove gold-silver deposit in north-central Nevada illustrates how a successful exploration program can boost the over…

In 1968, a supposedly stable, near-surface backfilled stope in Timmins collapsed. In 1981, an old stope caved to surface near the town of Malartic, Que., creating a depression 300 ft across and more t…

Is mankind doomed to someday walk the earth alone, save for domesticated animals and mutant insects? Will we turn our once “Garden of Eden” into a living purgatory, or even blow ourselves off the face…

I was interested to read the article in the June issue of your magazine entitled “High-Speed Mucking” and especially the portion on the Voest Alpine AL-60 loader. Unfortunately, the writer does not ap…

Talk about a notable lack of success. In Canada, we produce tons of by-product silver, enough to rank us fourth in the world, and the Sudbury Basin coughs up sufficient platinum group metals to make C…

About 120 million years ago, a metal-bearing, carbonate-rich hydrothermal fluid was channelled by a steeply dipping, major strike-slip fault zone which developed nearly 10 km beneath the contemporary…