What a fascinating proposition. FYI: This blog article is from 2013 and is about scientific papers written in 2008 and 2005. A few minutes of cursory Googling turns up nothing else.
It was actually used as the basis of a Young Adult book in 2005 [1] or a very similar idea. The book uses a large molten ore body created from explosive charges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl:_The_Opal_Decepti...