Recent Developments in Marine Diamond Mining     

Richard H. T. Garnett 《Marine Georesources & Geotechnology》2013,31(2):137-159

The marine diamond deposits of southern Africa owe their existence to fluvial transport down the Orange River to the South Atlantic. On the coast, they were moved, sorted and concentrated by high-energy sea and wind conditions to create a veneer of diamondiferous gravels on the sea floor. Large scale, offshore production by De Beers Marine commenced in 1989 in Namibian waters. The company now acts as a contractor for Namdeb, a corporation owned jointly with the Namibian governments. Some junior public companies also produce diamonds by large-scale mechanized means and conduct extensive exploration programs. Two important developments have occurred recently. Firstly, equipment for the recovery of diamonds from the seabed has been successfully borrowed from other industries. Large drills from onshore civil engineering have been modified for marine sampling and mining. Remotely controlled, seabed-mounted, excavational systems have assumed a major role. The new systems allow both evaluation sampling and subsequent mining to be undertaken by similar or the same equipment, making the results compatible. They permit highly selective extraction and enhanced recovery of the gravels from irregular bedrock in water approaching 200 m deep. But none is universally applicable offshore, each being the preferred system under different conditions. Secondly, the total output of sea diamonds from Namibian waters has increased to 0.8 million carats annually and now exceeds that from all the country's onshore sources. An industry has become established. Corporate and individual perseverence, government encouragement, new technology, shareholders' risk finance, and De Beers' diamond marketing have all played a role in the success. Future diamond production may increase as companies meet the challenge of working lower grade, higher volume deposits, which will require new approaches to the mining process. With a decrease in the physical risk of marine mining, the most variable inputs in operational planning and production forecasting are recovered grade and throughout rate, together with equipment availability. The importance of reliable grade estimation from sufficient sampling density is widely perceived, but the greatest performance risk can involve the predicted excavation rate and ''mineability'' of the seabed sediments. Published reserve statements would benefit from a requirement to specify the planned mining method, the consequent cutoff grade to be employed, and whether or not test mining has been undertaken.  相似文献   

Book review     

Z. J. Slouka 《Marine Georesources & Geotechnology》2013,31(1):69-70

The Control of the Sea‐bed: A New International Issue by Evan Luard. Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1974. 309 pp. $14.95.  相似文献   

甘肃省农村居民地震常识情况的调查分析     

钟秀梅  袁中夏  贾冠华  侯景瑞 《震灾防御技术》2012,7(2):184-192

了解农村居民对地震常识的掌握情况是做好农村震害防御工作的重要参考.本文研究设计了调查表格,对农村居民地震常识的掌握情况进行了调查.通过甘肃省16个县(区)的现场抽样调查,得到了甘肃省农村居民的地震常识掌握情况,并通过对比研究,分析了造成农村居民地震常识掌握不足以及造成差异的影响因素.基于调查结果,本文针对农村居民地震常识的掌握情况,提出了增强农村居民防震减灾知识,提高其震害防御意识的工作建议.  相似文献   

Efficient collection of training data for sub-pixel land cover classification using neural networks     

Stien Heremans  Bert Bossyns  Herman Eerens  Jos Van Orshoven 《International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation》2011

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a popular class of techniques for performing soft classifications of satellite images. They have successfully been applied for estimating crop areas through sub-pixel classification of medium to low resolution images. Before a network can be used for classification and estimation, however, it has to be trained. The collection of the reference area fractions needed to train an ANN is often both time-consuming and expensive. This study focuses on strategies for decreasing the efforts needed to collect the necessary reference data, without compromising the accuracy of the resulting area estimates. Two aspects were studied: the spatial sampling scheme (i) and the possibility for reusing trained networks in multiple consecutive seasons (ii). Belgium was chosen as the study area because of the vast amount of reference data available. Time series of monthly NDVI composites for both SPOT-VGT and MODIS were used as the network inputs. The results showed that accurate regional crop area estimation (R² > 80%) is possible using only 1% of the entire area for network training, provided that the training samples used are representative for the land use variability present in the study area. Limiting the training samples to a specific subset of the population, either geographically or thematically, significantly decreased the accuracy of the estimates. The results also indicate that the use of ANNs trained with data from one season to estimate area fractions in another season is not to be recommended. The interannual variability observed in the endmembers’ spectral signatures underlines the importance of using up-to-date training samples. It can thus be concluded that the representativeness of the training samples, both regarding the spatial and the temporal aspects, is an important issue in crop area estimation using ANNs that should not easily be ignored.  相似文献   

Comparing gravity and gravity gradient surveys     

Gary J. Barnes  John M. Lumley  Phill I. Houghton  Richard J. Gleave 《Geophysical Prospecting》2011,59(1):176-187

Noise levels in marine and airborne full tensor gravity gradiometer surveys together with conventional land, marine and airborne gravity surveys are estimated and analysed in gridded form, resulting in relations that detail how these different survey systems can be compared analytically. After defining survey parameters including line spacing, speed and instrument bandwidth, the relations estimate the noise levels that result on either grids of gravity (gz) or gravity gradient (Gzz) as a function of the spatial filtering often applied during geological interpretation. Such comparisons are believed to be a useful preliminary guide for survey selection and planning.  相似文献   

Determination of arsenic concentration and distribution in the Floridan Aquifer System     

T. Pichler  R. Price  O. Lazareva  A. Dippold 《Journal of Geochemical Exploration》2011,111(3):84-96

Here we report on the different sampling strategies for almost seven years of sampling rocks/sediments for the determination of As within the Intermediate Aquifer System (IAS) and upper Floridan Aquifer System (FAS), a very large and productive limestone aquifer spanning from Georgia into Florida. In the FAS, As contamination has become a recurring problem during aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), particularly in central and south Florida.To investigate these phenomena, samples from solid drill cores and rock cuttings were collected from the Hawthorn Group, Suwannee Limestone, Ocala Limestone and Avon Park Formation. Samples were taken along drill cores and rock cuttings (referred to as ‘interval’ samples) or from particular drill core sections and rock cuttings (referred to as ‘targeted’ samples) likely to contain elevated concentrations of As as indicated by the presence of pyrite, hydrous ferric oxide, organic matter, clay minerals, fracture surfaces, and high permeable (moldic) zones.Arsenic was present in all of the stratigraphic units at low concentrations, close to the global average for As in limestone of 2.6 mg/kg. The highest As concentration was 69 mg/kg. In all units, however, the average bulk As concentration in the targeted samples was substantially higher than that in the interval samples. Based on direct spot measurements by electron microprobe and indirect calculations, pyrite was identified as the main source of As in the FAS. Concentrations in pyrite ranged from less than 100 mg/kg to more than 11,000 mg/kg. Because pyrite is heterogeneously distributed, both vertically and horizontally in the sampled stratigraphic units, the same was observed for the distribution of As. However, As concentrations generally decreased with depth, i.e., highest As values in the Hawthorn Group and lowest As values in the Ocala Limestone and Avon Park Formation. Compared to pyrite, other trace minerals contained much less As.The average As concentrations of the two types of sample media (solid cores and rock cuttings) were quite similar. These results indicate that if simply the average bulk rock As concentration of a geologic unit is the desired outcome of an investigation, either interval or targeted sampling of rock cuttings, seems to be sufficient. This is particularly important when time and money are a factor. This approach could work equally well for any other trace element. Structural sedimentary information, such as fractures, etc., is likely lost, however, when sampling rock cuttings. Thus, if this information is required, solid core samples need to be collected by hollow core diamond drilling.  相似文献   

Effect of sample location on the reliability based design of pad foundations     

《Georisk: Assessment and Management of Risk for Engineered Systems and Geohazards》2013,7(3):155-166

Site investigations that aim to sufficiently characterize a soil profile for foundation design, typically consist of a combination of in situ and laboratory tests. The number of tests and/or soil samples is generally determined by the budget and time considerations placed upon the investigation. Therefore, it is necessary to plan the locations of such tests to provide the most suitable information for use in design. This is considered the sampling strategy. However, the spatial variability of soil properties increases the complexity of this exercise. Results presented in this paper identify the errors associated with using soil properties from a single sample location on a pad foundation designed for settlement. Sample locations are distributed around the site to identify the most appropriate sample location and the relative benefits of taking soil samples closer to the center of the proposed footing. The variability of the underlying soil profile is also shown to a have a significant effect on the errors due to sampling location. Such effects have been shown in terms of the statistical properties of the soil profile. The performance of several common settlement relationships to design a foundation based on the results of a single sample location have also been examined.  相似文献   

Sampling strategies to evaluate the status of offshore soft sediment assemblages     

Rogers SI  Somerfield PJ  Schratzberger M  Warwick R  Maxwell TA  Ellis JR 《Marine pollution bulletin》2008,56(5):880-894

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Empirically-based modeling of spatial sampling uncertainties associated with rainfall measurements by rain gauges     

Gabriele Villarini  Witold F. Krajewski 《Advances in water resources》2008

In the quantitative evaluation of radar-rainfall products (maps), rain gauge data are generally used as a good approximation of the true ground rainfall. However, rain gauges provide accurate measurements for a specific location, while radar estimates represent areal averages. Because these sampling discrepancies could introduce noise into the comparisons between these two sensors, they need to be accounted for. In this study, the spatial sampling error is defined as the ratio between the measurements by a single rain gauge and the true areal rainfall, defined as the value obtained by averaging the measurements by an adequate number of gauges within a pixel. Using a non-parametric scheme, the authors characterize its full statistical distribution for several spatial (4, 16 and 36 km²) and temporal (15 min and hourly) scales.  相似文献   

On the sampling errors from raingauges and microwave attenuation measurements     

C. Yoo 《Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (SERRA)》2000,14(1):69-77

The sampling error formalism by North and Nakamoto (1989) has been widely referenced in research papers on sampling using space-borne sensors or ground-borne sensors. However, their formalism is found to not only underestimate the sampling error, especially for the raingauge network case, but also not be applicable for the cases of using a line of raingauges or microwave attenuation measurements. In this paper, the sampling error formalism has been revised and applied to the same sampling design and the same rainrate model as in North and Nakamoto (1989) for the comparison. The sampling error estimated using the revised formula was found to be more than 50% higher than that by North and Nakamoto (1989). For the case of using a line of raingauges we found that the sampling error converges to a certain value, not zero as in North and Nakamoto formalism, as the number of gauges increases. The microwave attenuation measurements case, which is the same as the case of using a line of infinite raingauges, also gives non-zero sampling errors. Finally, the combined sampling using both satellite and ground-borne sensors (e.g., raingauge network, a line of raingauges, or microwave attenuation measurements) was reviewed to check their design orthogonality and estimated the sampling errors for the combination of satellite and raingauge network case to see its behavior depending on various settings of these two different measurements.  相似文献