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Group members: Piper, LaDainian, Rowan
Background Information on the Mine
The Olympic Dam Copper Mine, is a very interesting mine, it is located 550 Km (340 Miles) North west of Adelaide, It is also a large metallic underground mine. it is the fourth largest copper mine in the world and THE largest uranium deposit in the world! construction of the Olympic Dam Copper Mine began in 1986 and ended in 1988, and the mine opened in November in 1988.
Did you know! the Olympic Dam Copper Mine produces 205,000 tonnes of copper per year!
Mineral Formation
Copper is a metal that has been deposited from hot sulphur solutions, created in volcanic regions.
Copper is created in large masses of molten rock that cooled and solidified in the Earth's crust. At first, the copper is spread throughout the large mass of molten rock in low concentrations. As the magma cools and crystals begin to form, the amount of magma becomes smaller. The copper remained in the magma, becoming more and more concentrated. When the rock was almost completely solid, it contracted and cracked and the remaining copper-rich fluid was squeezed into the cracks, where it finally solidified. Over many millions of years the rocks covering these deposits eroded away and the deposits eventually appeared at the surface.
It is often found in deposits with other metals such as lead, zinc, gold and silver.
Mineral Extraction Method
This mine is a mixture of Open-Pit mining and tunnel-mining. The way they dig out ore is simple, they firstly start with the machines needed ready for both methods of mining, it starts as a massive open-pit mine tunnelling down underground, they get trucks to slowly go all the way underground and carry up the pit and tunnel, the ores. These are only deployed however, after ore has been found and a path has been made for the trucks.
Image of an open-pit mining truck underground in a tunnel mine
Economical Effects of the Mine
It makes $2,000,000,000 (2 Billion) per year and is the source of 13% of SA’s exported minerals.
Some of the jobs correlated to the Olympic Dam mining industry include: Operating the mine’s devices, mining down the mine to get inside, managing the mine and the workers, driving the trucks, engineering the machines, fixing them and making them. All these and probably a few unimportant others employ 4,500~ people. Plus all the stuff they mine nets them enough to keep the place running most-likely and they can use their own minerals as a power source for certain things.
If the mine shut down some things like this could occur: Starting off with good things the air would stop polluting and they would have room for more crops but they would lose all the income from the mine and unemploy 4,500~ people. And stop getting minerals for their town. Probably making them poor.
Image of an employed miner
Image of what it could theoretically look like if the mine shut down
Social Effects of the Mine
Copper mining has been found to release toxic chemicals that pollutes the air. The air that’s released from this, can harm people's skin, eyes, and lungs, making breathing difficult. While some copper can be essential for human health, an excess can be fatal. A 25-year-old man died in a workplace incident at a BHP mine site in South Australia. The emergency services rushed to the Olympic Dam, (about 560km north of Adelaide. In the early hours of Tuesday, news reported “pedestrian had been critically injured in a collision on private property,”. The cops reported the death occurred in the boundaries of the site.
This is a birds eye-view of the Mine.
Cultural Effects of the Mine
The Kokatha are the traditional custodians of the large sections of the land in the north of South Australia. This also includes the world’s largest mine BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam. The Kokatha people lived there for about 60,000 years. South Australians and the Kokatha people have an 18-year native land rights claim, gaining their land for them to mine copper and other minerals.
Environmental Effects of the Mine
The uranium mine at Olympic Dam poses a threat to the environment of the region and health hazards to the workers and surrounding populations. Uranium tailings, leaks, and spills have caused radiation to affect the ecosystem surrounding the site. It has caused both health and environmental effects on people and surrounding buildings, plants, and populations. There has been a depletion of groundwater supplies in the Great Artesian Basin which poses a severe environmental hazard.
Strategies to Protect the Environment
This is info about what the mining company went through to protect the environment, so without plagiarizing a 10-page essay, a guy called D. Marshall who originally worked in the Olympic Dam Mine Copper Uranium Division, states that the state and commonwealth government heads made an agreed on the Environmental Impact Statement which stated that they should protect the environment with stuff for 4 weeks every 3 years. Stuff meaning ten pages of stuff like ventilation, conditioning the environment, noise-lowering, anti-destroying the environment stuff and the like to help the world.
Whenever the plan is in action, they basically do anything the state government pays them to be able to fix.
You might be wondering if they went back on years-old problems to fix them after implementing this, well basically EIS continued for a while but now the mine is going bankrupt so they can’t fix anything except the mine itself, because the mine is failing the only thing they’re fixing is closing down the mine because BHP, the owner, says it’s not up-to-standard. So they’re going to replace it.
Current Mining Company Owner
Original Mining Company Owner who used the EIS system
Interactive Activity
Bibliography
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