Ivory Coast is a country rich in base metals and precious minerals: gold, manganese, diamond, iron, bauxite, cobalt and nickel. These natural resources are exposed to destruction and fragmentation by mining activities. The artisanal and small-scale exploitation of gold are increasingly practiced in our rural areas. These activities escape often in the control and monitoring of the mining administration. In order to better constrain these activities on the environment, the present work used remote sensing imageries to see its spatio-temporal impacts in the rural world in central Ivory Coast. The results show that gold artisanal activities have been practiced since 2013 and are experiencing an increasingly important growth. We note a devastation of forests and savannahs, a pollution of surface water, as well as an increase in poverty in rural areas. These activities are practiced near habited areas (villages). This creates a reduction of cultivatable soil. Remote sensing imageries make it possible to quickly map areas at large-scale gold mining in time and space.

In Ivory Coast, mining is one of the major sources of income for local people. Because of mining, jobs have been created thus increasing employment opportunities in rural regions. Moreover, this is a job that does not require a lot of skills, so a lot of people are able to join at the same time earning huge money within a short amount of time. Not only does this occupation attract adults, children are also interested in this activity. However, the negative social impacts caused by this activity remain indisputable. Chemical products used by miners and unsanitary conditions are harmful not only to miners themselves but also to innocent local people. There is a large destruction of lands, and also prostitution, which leads to the spreading of many contagious diseases. The paper mainly focuses on the impact of artisanal gold mining and its affects to local livelihoods and the environment in Ivory Coast. Some key recommendations for addressing artisanal mining activities in order to have good options for sustainable management of mineral resources in the country will be discussed.

Abstract.With the increasing depth of mining, rock burst is on the rise. China's deep mining industry faces such a threat. A major problem of deep mining is high ground stress, which is the major factor of rock burst. Due to the complexity of the rock burst mechanisms, complexity of induced factors as well as suddenness and randomness of rock burst occurrences, studies of rock burst prediction and control for safe mine exploitation is far from satisfying.The purpose of this paper is to examine of rock burst phenomenon in order to understand both stability in rock mechanics and the prediction of instability disasters in rock mechanics for application in the Ivory Coast mining sector with reference to the current Chinese mining industry.

To produce high-purity silica sand usable for glass making, the present study was carried out. The objective of this work was to increase the silicon dioxide (SiO 2 ) content to at least 99% using a simple process without chemical input. The raw sand samples were taken from the Ivorian sedimentary basin, from Maféré and Assinie areas, Côte d'Ivoire. Wet sieving and attrition technique were used for the purification process. The results from the energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) analyses of the raw and treated samples show a significant increase of silica content and a significant reduction of impurities. The silica content (SiO 2 ) of the sand of Maféré increases from 98.73% ± 0.15% to 99.92% ± 0.05%. And the sand of Assinie increased from 98.82% ± 0.67% in the raw samples to 99.44% ± 0.27% after treatment. The rate of iron oxide and alumina is reduced in these sands. Moreover, the sand of Maféré contains 53.2% of grains of size lower than 500 microns and that of Assinie contains 29.30%. Regarding the chemical composition of these purified sands, they meet the standard BS2975s, the American Ceramic Society and the National Bureau of Standards for window glass making.

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