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...

Recent NIOSH published information has shown an increase of rapidly progressive coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP) in the southern Appalachian coal region (SAR) of the U.S., despite the fact that compliance data indicates that most coal miners have been exposed to coal mine dust concentrations below the statutory limit of 2.0 mg/m3. While the exact cause of these elevated CWP levels in the SAR ...

This study investigates the risky positioning behaviour of underground coal mine employees, specifically the behaviour of drivers of remote controlled continuous miners. The patterns of behaviour of these employees are of particular interest, not only because of a series of fatal accidents in New South Wales coal mines with such equipment, but also because of the lack of scientific enquiry of r...

Methane gas emission, accumulation, and explosion are the most important risk factors in underground coal mines. Hence, having a knowledge of methane gas emission potential in underground coal mines is of crucial importance in preventing the explosion risk, loss of life, and property, and providing miners' safety. The purpose of this work is to provide the prediction maps for the C1, C2, and B2...

Knowledge of in situ stresses is fundamental to many studies in earth sciences, and coal mine ground control is no exception. During the past 20 years, it has become clear that horizontal stress is a critical factor affecting roof stability in underground coal mines. The theory of plate tectonics and the World Stress Map (WSM) project has been extremely helpful in explaining the sources and the...

Tabas mines in Iran have coal sources which are suitable for use in metallurgy industries as coking coal. But the high sulfur content of this coal imposes severe limitations on its utilization as the sulfur oxide gases evolved from the combustion of high sulfur coals result in acid rains and corrosion of equipments. In this work, attempts have been made to reduce sulfur from high sulfur coa...

poland is a traditional mining country ranking high in europian mining. a considerable part of polish national-gross-product comes from mineral resources. a large number of the working people work in the mines and related industry. research and educational centers depending on mining are well grown and are of great importance. the major mining commodities of poland are: coal, brown coal copper,...

Effective gas management in coal mines, as well as proper ventilation design, is very important for maintaining the safety of underground coal miners. Advances in numerical modeling techniques have enabled evaluations of the coal mining environment using advanced grid designs and computed gas distributions through detailed mathematical models. These models help engineers to “see” the “unseen” a...

The water quality parameters of the river Damodar flowing across the coal mines and industrial area was carried out in order to evaluate its suitability of irrigation application. Damodar River basin is the repository of 46% coal reserves in India and is one of the richest mineralized zones of the country with a high growth of mining and industrial development, demographic and urban growth exte...

Mining operations in China are often threatened by frequent water inrushes from confined karst aquifers, We need to evaluate the risk from water-inrush from coal floors in order to have safe production in mines. water inrush risk assessment method based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is introduced in this paper. A secondary fuzzy comprehensive evaluation system is constructed to evaluate the...