Dave 1234 wrote: ↑Wed. Jan. 15, 2025 9:52 pm
Very cool ! This blue marble that we all live on is amazing . I'm sure you guys that live in the anthracite region fully understand how rare your geology is.
When I lived in Wyoming my best friend was an oil well drill foreman . He drilled from Texas to North Dakota. It was fascinating to hear him tell about the layers of the earth and what he would find at different depths
Did your friend mention drilling through the big george coal seam in the Powder River Basin??
1. top soil
2. 200 feet of sandstone
3. 80 feet of Western Sub Bituminous Coal
4. 2,000 feet more of sandstone and shale
5. 200 feet of Sub Bituminous coal
lzaharis wrote: ↑Wed. Jan. 22, 2025 5:19 pm
Did your friend mention drilling through the big george coal seam in the Powder River Basin??
1. top soil
2. 200 feet of sandstone
3. 80 feet of Western Sub Bituminous Coal
4. 2,000 feet more of sandstone and shale
5. 200 feet of Sub Bituminous coal
I was a kid just out of high school then , I wish I wrote a book about this guy . He knew so much about life in the West when things had just moved past mules and horses .
I read a story this summer about China hitting a coal vain at 6000 ft. Shows how little we know about our geological past .
If anyone is ever to ashland, the pioneer tunnel tour is worth it. Very awesome, harkens back to the time when 'men were made of iron and ships were made of wood' (as my dad says)
I grew up above minersville and there was at least 3 abandoned shafts/mine sites my brother and I found by accident in the abandoned mining regions behind our house. One was a 20 x 20 vertical (elevator?) shaft within sight of a few houses, covered with a hasty concrete cap and a pile of dirt. We found it very much on accident, almost fell in. We dropped a heavy rock and it took 11 seconds for it to hit water, we figured over 400 ft deep, really creepy, I used to have nightmares about it.
Another one was a horizontal entrance on the side of an embankment, you could feel the cold air about 20 feet away during summer time. We crawled in and found a half existent room with some coal chutes and beams lying around. We crawled back some crevices with some cheap flashlights (pretty far in, probably over 60 ft underground) and found a downward sloping shale floor with vertical wooden beams every dozen feet. The whole thing sloped down at a 30ish degree angle. We climbed out, ran to home depot and bought 100' of roped marked "not for climbing" and then lowered our buddy down as far as the rope would allow but it just kept going. While leaving we found the area where the cold air was coming from, it was probably only a 4' x 4' crack and it felt like staring straight into a high powered fan. A few years later we went back in and the crack was collapsed shut somehow, no air movement. Creepy.
