Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is a blanket term for a type of subsistence mining involving a miner who may or may not be officially employed by a mining company but works independently, mining minerals using their own resources, usually by hand.
Artisanal gold mines near Dodoma, Tanzania. Makeshift sails lead fresh air underground.
Interior of an artisanal mine near Low's Creek, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. The human figures, exploring this mine, show the scale of tunnels driven entirely with hand tools (two-kilogram (4.4 lb) hammer and hand-forged scrap-steel chisel).
Gold-beading quartz vein in interior of an artisanal mine near Low's Creek, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, showing chisel marks from hand-driven chisels in working the mine.
This is an adit (horizontal or sloping mine entrance) in the Johannesburg municipality, near the suburb of Roodepoort. It is part of a chain of similar adits along a surface outcrop of the Roodepoort gold reef of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Coltan is a dull black metallic ore from which the elements niobium and tantalum are extracted. The niobium-dominant mineral in coltan is columbite, and the tantalum-dominant mineral is tantalite.
A piece of columbite–tantalite, size 6.0 × 2.5 × 2.1 cm
Rio Inírida
