Abstract: GCM was applied to research the quality of the environment of a certain gold mine in Shandong as a function of the exploitation depth. Monitoring tests and investigations were carried out on environmental factors, such as O₂, CO₂, dust, toxic gases, micro-climate, noise and illumination for the mining faces being at exploitation depths of -30, -70, -110, -150, -190, -230 and -300 m respectively. Trends in changes of environmental factors in the underground mining faces were analyzed. An assessment of comprehensive environment quality was made for the mining faces via introducing GCM integrated with G1 method for determining the weight values of the environmental factors. A questionnaire survey on subjective satisfaction was carried out into a part of staff of the gold mine. The results show that there is a negative correlation between the environment quality grade(EQGs) of mining face and the exploitation depth of mining face, and obtained findings coincide with the assessment results via GCM.

Key words: gold mine, mining face, environmental factors, grey clustering model(GCM), G1 model, comprehensive assessment