Mineral Marvels
What is Diamond?
A naturally occurring material from which a valuable mineral or minerals can be profitably extracted.
What is an ore?
This type of mining is used to extract minerals near the surface.
What is Surface Mining?
What is Undersea Mining?
This is the property that describes a mineral's resistance to scratching.
What is hardness?
These are mineral deposits that fill fractures in rock and are a source of many economically important metals.
What are Ore Veins?
This type of mining is used to extract minerals from deep underground.
What is Subsurface Mining?
This is the term for the environmental impact of mining, including habitat destruction and pollution.
What is Mining Footprint?
This is the process of melting or fusing ore in order to separate impurities from pure metal.
What is Smelting?
This type or property describes a mineral that breaks cleanly or with a flat surface.
What is cleavage?
These are combined metals (two or more), which contain the most desirous properties of the metals used to make them.
What are Alloys?
This type of surface mining is used to extract minerals from a hillside or mountain.
What is Strip Mining?
This environmental law regulates the discharge of pollutants into surface waters that could be caused by surface mining.
What is the Clean Water Act?
The material that bonds with impurities and separates them from the molten metal. (during the process of smelting)
What is Flux?
This is the most common mineral group.
What are Silicates
This is when bodies of water evaporate, leaving behind deposits of salt.
What are Evaporites?
This type of mining is used to extract minerals from riverbeds or beaches.
What is Placer Mining?
This is the process of restoring a mined area to its original condition or a condition suitable for other uses.
What is Reclamation?
These are the principal commodities produced by quarrying. They include sand, gravel, and crushed rock.
What are aggregates?
These minerals are found in ore deposits next to valuable minerals, but are not valuable themselves.
This is the process by which water dissolves minerals and carries them away, sometimes concentrating them in new locations.
What are hydrothermal processes?
This machine is used in Longwall mining and moves back and forth along the face of a coal seam.
What is a shearer?
This environmental law regulates chemicals that present a risk to public health or the environment.
What is the Toxic Substances Control Act (or TSCA)?
This mechanical layer of the Earth's geosphere contains most of the minerals we know today.
What is the lithosphere?