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Lecture

There is a popular saying in the mining industry, "If you cannot grow it; you have to mine it." Any material you possess that is not made out of wood, paper, or some other plant or animal material came from a mineral or rock resource. Here are some examples of what you encounter on a daily basis:

(The embedded links in this list are not required reading.)

  • The carpet in your house/apartment: Almost any carpet material is made out of plastic fibers, and plastic is almost entirely derived from oil.
  • Your toothpaste: The abrasive ingredient in toothpaste is silica (Yes, the most common mineral type in the Earth’s crust, the same thing that makes lava viscous!) or calcium carbonate, which are mined from quartz and calcite.
    A narrow and deep V-shaped pit in the Nevada desert

    An open pit gold mine in Nevada: Nevada is the world's third leading producer of gold, and aside from gambling, mining is the most important part of Nevada's economy (Nevada Bureau of Mines).

  • Your makeup: Most makeup is made from petroleum based oils and waxes, contains clays mined from sedimentary deposits, and contains minerals which add color and glitter.  A recent trend has been “mineral makeup,” which is supposed to be pure ground up minerals without any added chemicals, binders, dyes, or preservatives. 
  • Your walls: Houses are either made of plaster or gypsum walls, which are created from mining deposits of the mineral gypsum.  National Gypsum, a manufacturer of building and construction materials, lists all the places where it extracts gypsum for its products.  Shoals, Yankee Town, and Petersburg, Indiana are just a few of the places in the US where this is mined.
  • Your cell phone: The plastics (made from oil) and electronics (made from minerals or elements derived from silica, lead, columbite-tantalite, gold, etc.)

You can start to see how you can get to that 48,000 pounds of minerals!

This lecture is broken down into three sections:

  • Basics: We will cover the basics of mining, including the economic and environmental factors, and look at where mining occurs.

  • Indiana Resources: We will cover resources, specifically stone and coal that are found here in Indiana and how they are mined.

  • Coal: We will cover where and how coal is mined and discuss the environmental costs of coal mining.

You can click the tabs across the top of the page to access the three sections of the Resources lecture.


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