Abstract

The most important result of geomechanical and geodynamic studies of the past century was the discovery of a close relationship between global geodynamic and local geomechanical processes caused by mining operations, especially in tectonically active zones. No less important result of the research was the conclusion about the fundamental role of the block-hierarchical structure of rocks and massifs for explaining the existence of a wide range of nonlinear geomechanical effects and the emergence of complex self-organizing geosystems. Hierarchical structure is typical for many systems, especially for the Earth’s lithosphere, where more than 30 hierarchical levels from tectonic plates with a length of thousands of kilometers to individual mineral grains of millimeter size were identified by geophysical studies. Thus, the earth’s crust is not a continuous medium, but a discrete block system and, like any synergetic discrete ensemble, has hierarchical and self-similarity properties [1,2].