• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_1
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• pp.495-505
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• 2023

The Musan mine, situated in Musan County, Hamgyong Province, North Korea, stands as a prominent open-pit iron mine on the Korean Peninsula. This study focuses on estimating the mining and dumping activities within the Musan mine area by analyzing digital elevation model (DEM) changes. To calculate the long-term volume changes in the Musan mine, we digitized and converted the 1:200,000-scale third topographic map of the Joseon published in 1918 and compared with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) DEMs, including Shuttle Radar Topography Mission DEM (2000) and Copernicus DEM (2011-2015). The findings reveal that over a century, Musan mine yielded around 1.37 billion tons of iron ore, while approximately 1.06 billion tons of waste rock were dumped. This study is particularly significant as it utilizes a historical topographic map predating the full-scale development of Musan mine to estimate a century's mining production and waste rock deposition. It is expected that this research provides valuable insights for future investigation of surface change of North Korea where the acquisition of in situ data remains challenging.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.48 no.5
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• pp.391-400
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• 2015

Korea is a global steel producer and a major consumer while iron ore producing is very low compared to the demand. On the other hand, North Korea holds tremendous amount of iron reserves and, however, its producing rate is limited. Moreover, the data regarding mineral resources of North Korea is very limited and uncertain because of political isolation. This study estimated the amount of iron ore resource and production amount for the Musan Iron mine, the world-known open-pit mine of North Korea, using satellite imagery(Landsat MSS, ASTER) and digital maps between 1976 to 2007. As a result, the mining area of Musan mine was increased by $6.1km^2$ during the 30 years and the mining sector was estimated as $4.9km^2$. We estimated the iron resources and production amount of 0.7 and 0.2 billion metric tons, respectively based on 3D modeling and average iron ore density of Anshan formation in China. This amount indicates 8.1 million tons of annual average production and it coincides well with previous reports. We expect this study would be utilized significantly on inter-Korean exchange programs by providing trustable preliminary data.