Throughout the Standard, certain words are used in a general sense when a more specific meaning might be attached to them by particular commodity groups within the industry. In order to avoid unnecessary duplication, a non-exclusive list of generic terms is tabulated below together with other terms that may be regarded as synonymous for the purposes of this document. <...>

Glaciers and ice sheets are among the world’s most beautiful and fascinating natural wonders. Whereas today glacier ice covers approximately a tenth of Earth’s land surface, during the ice ages of the last few million years, as much as a third of the land surface was covered by glacier ice. Modern glaciers and ice sheets possess many interesting features that reflect their dynamics, their interaction with landscape, rock, sediment and water, and they also inform us about climate change. The legacy of ice masses is reflected in the presence of a variety of landforms and sediments, many of which are also recorded in the rock record. The value of glaciers to society is immense.

Coal is still a dominant fuel in America, Australia, China, Mongolia and Russia, but more and more countries are abandoning coal and turning to alternative sources of energy, increasingly renewable energy provided by wind, wave or solar power. So now is an opportune time to take stock of the impact that coal and coal mining have had on countries around the world. Some 48 countries have institutions recording or commemorating that history in the form of museums, heritage centres or preserved colliery sites, of which this book considers 432 examples. It is not a straightforward account of the history of coal mining but rather an examination of how that history has been presented by different institutions and cultures.

In their paper, Marcotte and Boucher (2001) cast some new light on the old problem of 2D estimation of vein-type deposits with thickness and grade of intercepts. Using a theoretical approach, some extensive simulation experiments and the Walker Lake data, they show that the direct approach (interpolation of grade at points on a regular grid) gives better estimates of the true grade at those points than the indirect approach (interpolation of grade x thickness or accumulation and interpolation of thickness) when there is some positive correlation between grade and thickness and that this better performance increases with the correlation of grade and thickness as well as the variability of both variables. We would like to bring some reservations to that conclusion by showing that even if direct point grade estimates are better than indirect ones, it is not necessarily true for block estimates and in particular for the estimated grade of the whole orebody itself. <...>