Abstract
At Palabora Mine the seismic system was separated from the Rock Mechanics Department and classified as a cave monitoring tool and consequently the seismic system became part of the Cave Management Section. As a consequence of this, the seismic monitoring priorities were clear, resulting in planning, testing and implementation of interpretation methods specifically for the purpose of cave monitoring and its management. In this chapter there is a description of the Palabora Mine seismic recording system as it was when I arrived at the mine. The following upgrades are discussed together with their influence on the quality of the recorded data. In the further part of this chapter I describe how in real time I have reported the caving progress. Firstly it was the stress caving process initiation followed by the central pillar failure and then its break through into the open pit. Seismic monitoring during production stoppages allowed for estimating the air gap size at the top of the cave. At the time this was very important as every manager at the mine still remembered the tragic consequences of a large in size air gap at Northparkes Lift 1 Mine.
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Glazer, S.N. (2016). Palabora Seismic History. In: Mine Seismology: Data Analysis and Interpretation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32612-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32612-2_6
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