“Agate” is defined by the American Geological Institute Glossary (1960) “as a kind of silica consisting mainly of chalcedony in variegated bands or other patterns commonly occupying vugs in volcanic and some other rocks.” Dana’s Textbook of Mineralogy (1898) defines agate as “a variegated chalcedony. The colors are either (a) banded; or (b) irregularly clouded; or (c) due to visible impurities as in moss agate, which has brown moss-like or dendritic forms, as of manganese oxide, distributed through the mass.

Geological exploration of Mongolia has been extremely inconsistent. From the frst regional exploration by Russian explorers of Asia to the present, little more than 41% of the country’s territory has been covered by areal geological surveys in combination with prospecting at a scale of 1:50,000. Regional geological surveys at a scale of 1:200,000, 1:500,000, and 1:1,000,000 cover 100% of the country.

Objectives:

• This section deals with detailed study of the principles of data warehousing, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

• The availability of very large volumes of such data has created a problem of how to extract useful, task-oriented knowledge.

• The aim of data mining is to extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful patterns from data.

• Data warehousing represents an ideal vision of maintaining a central repository of all organizational data.

• Centralization of data is needed to maximize user access and analysis.

Mining and metallurgical engineering encompasses two major disciplines: mining engineering and metallurgical engineering. Mining engineering separates useful minerals from worthless minerals (often called gangue) or harmful minerals through processes such as mining and mineral processing, or separates multiple useful minerals to obtain raw materials for metallurgy, energy, chemical industry, building materials, and other industries. Mining in a broad sense also includes the extraction of coal, oil, and gas, but this volume mainly focuses on the mining of metal ores. Metallurgical engineering applies the principle of metallurgy to smelt, process, and ultimately obtain metallic materials necessary for human society’s production and human life from the raw materials obtained in mineral engineering.

Wenchuan Earthquake (Ms = 8.0) triggered tens of thousands of landslides throughout an area of about 100,000 km2. The distribution of landslides is definitely affected by the such factors as geomorphology, topography, lithology and human engineering activities, but the distribution of earthquake-triggered landslides are mainly controlled by the co-seismic fault, for they present zontal distribution along the co-seismic fault.

It is customary to analyze the behavior of foundations under the implicit assumption that the ground will suffer deformations and settle as a result of the increasing load transmitted by a construction in progress. Usually an estimation has to be made of the final movements to be expected in the construction (whether a building or a public work) in the short or in the long term.

Soil response to seismic motion (cyclic dynamic loading) depends on the mechanical properties of the soil. Soil behavior under various conditions of loading is defined by one or the other of its mechanical properties. In conditions of heavy loading, soils can exhibit dynamic instability, when their deformability and the probability of destruction increase.

Dynamic properties of soils have been investigated since the 1900s and addressed in a number of renowned studies of K. Terzaghi, N.M. Gersevanov, V.A. Florin, Ya.I. Frenkel, M. Biot, and others. A qualitatively higher level of the research has been reached in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the catastrophic earthquakes of 1964 in Anchorage (Alaska) and Niigata (Japan) and the 1971 earthquake in California.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has seen the emergence of its unprecedentedly comprehensive global military mapping programme and the commercial availability of a vast number of detailed topographic maps and city plans at several scales. This thesis provides an in-depth examination of the series of over 2,000 large-scale city plans produced by the Military Topographic Directorate (Boennoe topogpafiqeckoe yppavlenie) of the General Staff between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. After positioning the series in its historical context, the nature and content of the plans are examined in detail.

Water is among the most essential resources that sustain Earth’s ecosystems, but these systems are currently under threat due to land use and climate change. Assessing the impact of this global change on water security and ecosystem’s functions is not only the key concern of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, playing a key role in sustainable development of society, but also the most important research focus in “Future Earth” and Earth critical zone research.