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SCIENCEFriday 2 February 2018
U.S. officials consider new tool to combat mine spills: Robots
By DAN ELLIOTT A robot rolls through an underground mine at the Edgar Mine set of Denver, Colo., Dec. 13, 2017. water.
Associated Press Associated Press They would look more
DENVER (AP) — Crumbling like golf carts than the
mine tunnels awash with dreds of inactive mines The acidic water then “You can send a robot into personable robots from
polluted waters perforate nationwide for decades, leaches heavy metals out an area that doesn’t have “Star Wars” movies. Hao
the Colorado mountains, the product of complicat- of the rocks. good air quality. Zhang, an assistant profes-
and scientists may one ed and sometimes poorly To manage and treat You can send a robot into sor of computer science
day send robots creeping understood subterranean the wastewater, the EPA an area that doesn’t have at the Colorado School of
through the pitch-black flows. needs a clear idea of much space,” said Rebec- Mines, envisions a battery-
passages to study the mys- Mining creates tainted what’s inside the mines, ca Thomas, project man- powered robot about 5
terious currents that some- water in steps: Blasting out some of which penetrate ager for the EPA’s newly feet (1.5 meters) long with
times burst to the surface tunnels and processing ore thousands of feet into the created Gold King Super- wheels or tracks to get
with devastating effects. exposes long-buried, sulfur- mountains. But many old fund site, officially known through collapsing, rubble-
One such disaster hap- bearing rocks to oxygen. mines are poorly docu- as the Bonita Peak Mining strewn tunnels.
pened at the inactive Gold The sulfur and oxygen mix mented. District. Zhang and a team of stu-
King Mine in southwestern with natural underground Investigating with robots Instruments on the robots dents demonstrated a
Colorado in 2015, when water flows to create sulfu- would be cheaper, faster could map the mines and smaller robot in a mine
the Environmental Protec- ric acid. and safer than humans. analyze pollutants in the west of Denver recently.
tion Agency accidentally It purred smoothly along
triggered the release of 3 flat tunnel floors but top-
million gallons (11 million pled over trying to negoti-
liters) of mustard-colored ate a cluttered passage.
water laden with arsenic, “The terrain is pretty rough,”
lead and other contami- Zhang said. “It’s hard for
nants. The spill tainted riv- even humans to navigate
ers in three states. in that environment.”
Now, the EPA is consider- A commercial robot modi-
ing using robots and other fied to explore abandoned
sophisticated technology mines — including those
to help prevent these types swamped with acidic
of “blowouts” or clean wastewater — could cost
them up if they happen. about $90,000 and take
But first the agency has to three to four years to de-
find out what’s inside the velop, Zhang said.
mines, some of which date Significant obstacles re-
to Colorado’s gold rush in main, including finding a
the 1860s. way to operate remotely
Wastewater containing while deep inside a mine,
toxic heavy metals has beyond the reach of radio
been spewing from hun- signals. q
1 Oklahoma quakes tied to how
deep wastewater is injected
In this Nov. 6, 2011 file photo, Chad Devereaux examines BY SETH BORENSTEIN State regulators could cut garten, who wasn’t part of
bricks that fell from three sides of his in-laws home in Sparks, AP Science Writer about in half the number of the study.
Okla., after two earthquakes hit the area in less than 24 WASHINGTON (AP) — A man-made quakes by re- Lab experiments show
hours. new study finds that a ma- stricting deep injections in basement rocks are more
jor trigger of man-made the ground, said lead au- susceptible to earthquakes
Associated Press earthquakes rattling Okla- thor Thea Hincks, an earth because “having fluids in
homa is how deep — not scientist at the University of a rock is going to weaken
just how much — fracking Bristol in the United King- the rock,” said co-author
wastewater is injected into dom. Thomas Gernon, a ge-
the ground. Companies drilling for oil ologist at the University of
Scientists analyzed more and gas should not inject Southampton.
than 10,000 wastewater waste within 600 to 1500 Previous studies had pin-
injection wells where 96 bil- feet (200 to 500 meters) of pointed the amount of flu-
lion gallons of fluid — left- the geologic basement. ids injected into wells as an
over from hydraulic fractur- That’s the stable harder issue. Gernon said volume
ing — are pumped yearly. rock deep underground does trigger earthquakes,
The amount of wastewater usually made of metamor- but when volume levels
injected and the depth phic and igneous rocks. were reduced the num-
are key to understanding That region is usually criss- ber of quakes didn’t drop
the quake outbreak since crossed with earthquake as much as had been ex-
2009, they reported in faults. pected. That’s because
Thursday’s journal Science The closer you get to the where the stuff is put mat-
. The quakes included a faults, the more likely you ters slightly more, he said.
damaging magnitude 5.8 are to trigger them, said The findings only apply to
in 2016, the strongest in Stanford University geo- quakes in Oklahoma, re-
state history. physicist Matthew Wein- searchers said.q
