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[Noble Digger]

As it happens, fires in coal mines, coal seams, and other underground sources of carbon-bearing rock are extremely widespread. It makes me wonder just how much Carbon is being paired up with Oxygen and shot off into the atmosphere through these cracks and crevices, to say the least of any toxins borne in the coal such as Benzene (a liquid, thankfully) and lead. It's been a while since I studied up on coal fires, so I headed to Wikipedia. I started with what was, to me, the most obvious starting-point article "Coal Seam Fire":: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire

"A coal seam fire or mine fire is the underground smouldering of a coal deposit, often in a coal mine. Such fires have economic, social and ecological impacts. They are often started by lightning, grass, or forest fires, and are particularly insidious because they continue to smoulder underground after surface fires have been extinguished, sometimes for many years, before flaring up and restarting forest and brush fires nearby. They propagate in a creeping fashion along mine shafts and cracks in geologic structures."

Aside from being written by a Canadian or some other type with the affinity for those precious extra "U"s (I'm partial to "colour" myself, but mostly to irk fellow Americans), this article related very closely to my recent DF experiences. Having embarked at a flat desert with a thick, healthy, 4-z layer of Limestone just racing with seams of coal and lignite, I could probably have gotten by without ever using magma. Nonetheless, I wanted to bring magma to the surface and at one point there was coal in the path of the pump stack. As far as I know, walls and floors presently NEVER ignite under any circumstances, even if they're made of soap or silver they can hold in magma for all eternity. Despite this, I imagine the worst-case scenario where magma ignites a coal vein or a coal flooring and gradually burns through from the magma source into my fort's dining hall, so I ended up flooring it all over with Bauxite and replacing coal walls with Bauxite Blocks. Wasn't necessary, but half of DF is pretending, right?

This leaves me wondering if a percentage of natural caverns weren't once coal veins that burned away over the course of tens or scores or hundreds of years, leaving an extremely organically-fertile cavern behind which nourishes all manner of underground life. I wouldn't be surprised if such a cave needed a few decades of bioremediation through natural microbes to "clean up" the cavern a bit before it stopped being a toxic environment. Then again, there's a host of adapted lifeforms for most any niche you can imagine...

Now, to the !!Fun!! part of the thread. They mention Lightning, Grass Fires, and Forest Fires as sources of ignition of these veins. While coal is a valuable natural resource in DF, it's presently not very dangerous like say, magma or a running underground river might be. Natural resources must be protected if they are to be harnessed completely and safely. I'd really like to see these veins serve as a source of significant danger at some point, with ignited veins burning away amidst an unreasonable volume of smoke at a rate of 1 tile of exposed surface area per 9 months or something in that... ... ...vein. >_> *dodges pun-seeking missiles* I imagine that in order to extinguish a coal vein, the entire tunnel would require flooding. Extinguishing it with mining picks, well, suffice to say I imagine it would be a disaster, assuming one could not get into an oxygen-deprived cave and manage the endurance to swing a pick for enough time to break down all of the burning rock face without igniting the newly-exposed faces with the existing burning material. I'd definitely like to see veins have a chance to ignite in proximity to fire or magma. Lightning doesn't currently exist but it surely could, even if it had to be done in a cheesy fashion with a pause-recenter event if anything meaningful was struck by lightning. How to render lightning in 2D ASCII, however...? With lightning, we could have natural grass fires, and more reasons to fear the overworld prison reserved for the races rejected by the stone.

All of this makes me wonder at the structural role in organic substances that fill a layer or reservoir or vein like this. Once removed, do these voids left over from oil drilling, coal mining, etc. provide an opportunity for underground collapses or geologic instability? Could all those drained oil reservoirs simply collapse, on a massive (many many acres) scale, causing depression of the land above? Could a burned-out coal seam effectively behave as a faultline?

Another bit scares me just slightly, from the same wiki article:

Global coal fire emission are estimated to include 40 tons of mercury going into the atmosphere annually, and three percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.

Oh, methyl mercury poisoning. Why must I be a fish-lover? Personally, I don't believe that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas"; CO2 is the main or only means by which plants obtain carbon with which to grow and build their bodies. If you increase the supply they will eat more. In the study of horticulture I learned to burn a tea candle periodically when growing indoor plants as a "snack." Please no off-color jokes here, I don't grow marijuana. I do have a selection of Spider Plants and whatever these are called, however. Any amount of mercury is pretty much a horrible thing for the ecosystem since it is a biomagnifying toxin which works its way up the food chain to humans.

I wonder what, if anything, we could hope to do to put out these RL coal fires. The existing one which I had studied previously:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania#Mine_fire has been burning for 45 years and acknowledged as a lost cause. The city of Centralia was abandoned and a scant 5 or 10 residents remain, the government has even revoked Centralia's ZIP code despite that a few residents refuse to leave their homes. In response, they put up a park bench bearing their stolen ZIP code. True dwarves, here. Burning coal seam? Magma leaking out of the rock above sea-level? Physical gateway to HELL spewing demons? It's fine, this is our home. However, apparently::

"In 2009, Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of Centralia residents. He is facing criticism from some for this move."

To have already lost their hometown in this fashion can leave some people dejected with a feeling that it was all pointless. The last thing they have is the freedom of choice to remain in their homes for better or worse. I'm not sure how I feel about someone else choosing for them that they may no longer do so.



(Attempt #2. This time we have a bit meatier of an OP. Let's remain civil and focused on the topic. Peace, my dwarven brethren! Forget about the previous thread.)

[tfaal]

Burning coal seams are definitely an interesting prospect. However, we really need to get a better notion of fire before we can begin to explore them. At the very least, dwarves should try to put themselves out, and there should be a way to douse burning material. Oxygen and airflow are also concerns, but I think they can be safely skipped. The explanation of caverns is a cool one, but given the fact that caverns lead all the way down to hell itself, I think it's alright to have them be magical in origin.

[Ratbert_CP]

At the very least, dwarves should try to put themselves out, and there should be a way to douse burning material.

I thought they did.  With booze...

[Salabasama]

Why put it out?  At my fort, we'd dig on the other side of the fire and wall off the veins, flood the whole thing with magma to clean it out, drain it, and then use it as a food stockpile.  Mercury's good for dwarves.


Edit:  Dwarves' stats should be based on blood levels of various poisonous heavy metals.

[Symmetry]

Edit:  Dwarves' stats should be based on blood levels of various poisonous heavy metals.

Salt, Pepper, Ketchup, Uranium..

[smjjames]

Believe what you will about global warming and carbon dioxide, but plants can only absorb so much in a year and the problem is that we are releasing far more C2O into the atmosphere than natural systems can scrub out or absorb.

[Noble Digger]

Believe what you will about global warming and carbon dioxide, but plants can only absorb so much in a year and the problem is that we are releasing far more C2O into the atmosphere than natural systems can scrub out or absorb.

I also read that the amount of CO2 being ejected by that one volcano in Greenland (or was it iceland?) is ejecting many times more CO2 than the entire human race and all of its mistakes combined. Is this true, in your opinion? Moreover, would you agree then that the solution to excess CO2 polution is to plant, cultivate, and protect many more plants and trees as soon as we freaking can?

[godisdead132]

co2 is a greenhouse gas but its not that powerfull. also the notion that cutting down rainforests increases co2 is just stupid all the forests in the world produce around 2% of the worlds oxegen. as for coal fires they are a large problem but mostly because of heavy metal emissions and sulpher. personaly i like to think of the caverns as a kind of dwarven avernum http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ which i would like to see implimented is simmilar ways.

[Ratbert_CP]

Calm down folks.  CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.  So is water vapor.  Here's an except from Wikipedia:

In order, Earth's most abundant greenhouse gases are:

• water vapor
• carbon dioxide
• atmospheric methane
• nitrous oxide
• ozone
• chlorofluorocarbons

I didn't parse out where anyone said we had to do anything about it, they just pointed out that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.  And the amount of it in the atmosphere *is* increasing.

BTW, did you know the increase in CO₂ is causing Poison Ivy (and Poison Oak and Poison Sumac) to grow faster, bigger and the urushiol more potent?

[Eugenitor]

I also read that the amount of CO2 being ejected by that one volcano in Greenland (or was it iceland?) is ejecting many times more CO2 than the entire human race and all of its mistakes combined.

What you read was horsecrap.

Trees, agriculture, and everything else pulls it out of the air. Plants love the stuff, and some actually grow faster in the presence of more CO2. I actually wonder what would happen if a coal power plant "irrigated" its exhaust onto a corn farm, particularly with something bioengineered to eat more of it.

But anyway, coal seams. In DF they'd just slowly burn, the fire spreading down the seam as a wave. Since DF's concept of time is funky, it's hard to say if they'd burn as slow as they do in real life or not. IMO we need firefighting- bucket brigades, smothering, etc- before we implement more !!stuff!!.

Fun fact: With all the coal dust that floats around after mining, one spark would light the whole thing up. You *can't* do cooking, forging, etc on a place where you just dug out coal, unless you like fireballs. This would probably lead to some fast Fun for a lot of forts if implemented.

[godisdead132]

Trees, agriculture, and everything else pulls it out of the air. Plants love the stuff, and some actually grow faster in the presence of more CO2. I actually wonder what would happen if a coal power plant "irrigated" its exhaust onto a corn farm, particularly with something bioengineered to eat more of it.

some coal plants have been doing just this with algae tanks they pump the emissions through tanks of algae that feeds off the co2 and absorbs other harmfull biproducts then they use the algae to make biofuel sadly only a few plants do this so far

[Noble Digger]

I really feel like specially-chosen organisms are the answer to some of our pollution-related problems. We already have small bioreactors in many homes (the septic system) whose waste is allowed to leech into soil, where it reenters the chain of life. Dwarves could use hogs to get rid of many types of garbage and fertilize with the manure. I feel like using coal dust in this capacity is a bit beyond the ken of dwarves, however. Most of our oxygen is produced by phytoplankton, so polluting the ocean is arguably worse. The thing is that many of things we humans regard as pollutants are treated as DELICIOUS CANDY by a number of organisms. The same cannot be said of heavy metal residues, which, to my knowledge, are universally bad for organisms.

[godisdead132]

ya most organic polutants can be processed by various organisims the real problem is heavy metals however some organisims can chelate these things out into complex organic compounds that are mostly harmless and can be seperated out and stored or used (heavy metals may be bad but they also alow alot of the technologys we use today like florecent lights which use mercury) so the situation can be fixed it just requires alot of reserch into adaption of various biorganisims into processing methods

[Eugenitor]

Chelation? Grasped well.
Punctuation? Seldom used.
The mind, it boggles.

[Noble Digger]

ya most organic polutants can be processed by various organisims the real problem is heavy metals however some organisims can chelate these things out into complex organic compounds that are mostly harmless and can be seperated out and stored or used (heavy metals may be bad but they also alow alot of the technologys we use today like florecent lights which use mercury) so the situation can be fixed it just requires alot of reserch into adaption of various biorganisims into processing methods

Interesting, I know that the major problem with heavy metal ions is that they are too large to pass through some of a body's filtration membranes, thus they collect in very important organs like the liver, kidneys, etc. Many people who have suffered advanced mercury poisoning are in such a detestable state, and as far as I know, medical science can do nothing to help them due to the compartmental nature of these organs. If there were some way to cause the body to treat these toxins as a building material, say, by introducing a protein which catalyzes or chelates them into a handleable molecule and allows macro-transport out of the body somehow (when a macrophage is 'full' does it die, or how does it make its way out as waste? Do they bypass selectively-permeable membranes in this process? Are they simply re-eaten by other macrophages? How does this result in a net reduction of toxic content?) Imagine if we could chelate mercury(I) ions with a large number of iron atoms or keratin grains, such that they would form nodules that could be mechanically removed, even if at the cost of a small percentage of healthy liver tissue?

Edit: I am now studying Chelation Therapy which I didn't know existed.