Two recent coal mine accidents in Appalachia have led to calls for establishment of national standards for documentation of underground mines and for a reassessment of the state of technologies, such as remote sensing and mapping, available for the task.
But experts in the field say the rough terrain and geology of the eastern U.S. coal regions will make this a particularly difficult problem for any one technology to solve. "There is no silver bullet," cautions Don W. Steeples, professor of geophysics who specializes in remote sensing at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.