Kursk Magnetic Anomaly

The Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (KMA; Russian Курская магнитная аномалия ( КМА )) is the world's largest magnetic anomaly of the magnetic field of the earth.

General

It is caused by the world's largest known iron ore basin around the city of Kursk in Russia. Store here (estimated ) 200 billion tons of ore with an average iron content between 35 and 60 percent. Thus, the magnetic needle of the compass is deflected in the area of the usual north.

The name of the Kursk magnetic anomaly is also on the iron ore deposit itself or the more than 100,000 square kilometer area in the oblasts Kursk, Belgorod and Orel, which it includes, passed.

Discovery and use history

The anomaly was first described in 1773 by the astronomer and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Pyotr Inochodzew.

1874 began the lecturer of the University of Kazan N. Smirnov with geomagnetic measurements and 1883 iron ore deposits were from lecturer N. Pitschikow Kharkov University for the first time predicted as the cause of the anomaly.

Work in this direction have been up to the First World War, in particular from the German - Baltic Ernst Leist (1852-1918), a physicist at the University of Moscow performed.

For detailed geological investigations, it came only in the 1920s, led by a state commission under the geologist Ivan Gubkin.

The first iron ore was found on 7 April 1923 in the vicinity of the city Schtschigry at a depth of 167 meters, the first mineable ore in 1931.

1935, the trial underground mining, the large scale production in the opencast mines, however, did not begin until the 1950s. The first enrichment plant commenced operation in 1956.

The largest mining today is Lebedinski at Gubkin with a depth of 350 meters ( sole so about 150 meters below sea level), from which since 1971 already more than a billion tons of iron ore were promoted.