Groups seek to stop copper mine near popular Montana river
Montana Trout Unlimited and other groups filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging state officials did not thoroughly study the environmental harm that could result from the Black Butte copper mine in central Montana.
The Montana Department of Environmental Protection and Tintina Montana Resources were named as defendants in the complaint filed in state district court in Meagher County. DEQ spokeswoman Rebecca Harbage said the agency had not yet received the lawsuit and had no immediate response.
State officials said in approving the mine in April that it would have to abide by some of the most stringent conditions ever issued for a hardrock mine in Montana. A Tintina subsidiary, Sandfire Resources is seeking about $300 million to develop the project, which is expected to bring in about $2 billion in revenue. Opponents of the mine say it will pollute a tributary of the Smith River.
They point to ongoing mining pollution in other parts of the state that occurred when companies went bankrupt and state and federal agencies had to take over cleanup efforts.
The development of mineral resources should be coordinated with the ecological environment. The improvement of exploration technology is conducive to enhancing the utilization of mineral resources without significantly compromising the environment.
Enhancement of anomaly plays such a critical role in mineral exploration that this work has been carried out by removed noise in geophysical data. Power spectrum area (PSA) and multifractal singular value decomposition (MSVD) methods are usually used in the geochemical exploration process but have not been widely used in the geoelectrical data so far.
Mohammad Shahi Ferdows carried out a comparison of the two methods, which was published on the journal Advances in Geoscience. In this paper, IP data were inversed by the linear method. Then, enhancement of anomaly IP data were carried out by PSA and MSVD methods. Results were compared with each other. In addition, this can create an innovative method to enhancing anomaly in geoelectrical interpretation as well as geochemical and seismic data processing.
It turned out results of the two methods were acceptable for high lighting anomalies IP data. However, the PSA method further highlighted the location of anomalies IP data.
Read the full paper at:
http://ojs.usp-pl.com/index.php/ag/article/view/1287