The Trinidad Coal Mines

Fossil hunting in coal mines.

At the northern tip of Colombia, Jonathan Bloch hunts for fossils in the midst of spontaneous combustion fires, noxious gases laced with foul-smelling sulfur, rock-shattering explosions, and some of the largest machines in the world. “It is a weird place to work,” Bloch admits, an associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the FloridaMuseum of Natural History, although he says he feels saf...

Chinese coal mines--the industrial death trap.

Pneumoconiosis in Central Indian coal-mines.

Extensive surveys carried out in Europe and America have shown the incidence of coalworkers' pneumoconiosis to be widespread (Flinn, Seifert, Brinton, Jones, and Franks, 1941; Fletcher, 1955). In India, however, the prevalence of this disease has never been investigated, and a report published by the government of India in 1946 (Deshpande, 1946) stated that there was no conclusive evidence that...

Knowledge-Enhanced CO-monitoring in Coal-Mines

Detection of underground res is an important security task in hard-coal mining. Automated re detection systems are usually based on the monitoring of carbon monoxide (CO). Systems using conventional technology based on threshold and tendency observations, however, generate a large number of false alarms. We show how CO-concentrations can be forecast by appropriate models of the physical and che...

Gas Drainage Improvement in Underground Coal Mines

Effective gas management is vital to the success of the longwall mining in the Bulli seam, in the Southern Coalfield, Sydney Basin, NSW, Australia. The evolution of gas drainage methods and practices are discussed with respect to gas type, gas drainage lead time and prevailing geological conditions. Both underground to inseam drilling and surface to inseam drilling techniques are described at b...