The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-02-03
s,147,o0O, 900

CanaQa ana Cnlha, ana so lar lneIF mines are practically undeveloped. With the exception of one or two mines, the great coal fields of China are not used at all. In many places the coal for local consumption is dug , out with picks, and in some of the Chinese cities coal is so valuable that it is ground to dust and mixed with dirt and sold in balls the size of a biscuit. There is no mention here of the mines of Japan. That country has some excellent deposits, but they are hard to mine. During my travels there l visited a coal property at Nagasaki, which has 50 miles of tunnels under the Pacific ocean. That coal is being taken out for the Japanese navy. It is the same in South America. The chief coal mines of that continent run un- der the ocean off the coast of south ern Chile. I have visited those mines, riding on an electric road under the Bay of Conception, with the ships sail ing about overhead.
 Siberia has almost as much unde- veloped coal as the amount left in the mines of Great Britain. For years England has been the center of the coal production of the world, and for a long time it furnished half of the coal used by mankind. It has long
 
 surface. and the miners are now work ing hundreds and in some cases thou sands of feet below ground. The coal veins are thin. In some of the mines the men have to lie on their sides to pick the coal out. The rich New castle field has veins from three to six feet in thickness, and many of the Wales veins are only three feet thick. Some of our Pennsylvania veins are from 30 to SO feet thick. and the bit luminous coal near Pittsburg measures from eight to Is feet, while in the coal fields of Alaska we have great beds which are 40 feet thick.
 And now let us look at our own coal reserves have before me some fig ures made this year by Dr. Marius R. Campbell, one of the leading experts of the geological survey. They will show us how much coal we nave and how long it will probably last We need not be worried about the inl- mediate future. The amount so far used is only four-tenths of one per cent of our available supply. and we shall be mining coal down to our grandchildren of 10 generations or more. We can keep up our present rate of production, including all the coal we are taking out for. fighting the Ger mans, for three or four thousand years, and still allow an enormous amount for waste in mining and hand ling.
 Some of the mines of Belgium which are now worked by the Germans are 4c00 feet deep. They are the deepest coal mines of the world, but the min ing of the future will probably be car ried to a depth of 60oo feet or more than mile underground.
 The estimates of Dr. Campbell as to our available coal include those down to a depth of only 5000 feet, or a little more than one-half mile below the surface. His estimates run into the thousands of billions of tons. I shall not give them in figures, but Dr. Campbell says the amount is so great that if it could be dragged forth and laid in one pile as solid as it now lies in the ground it would form cube of more than IS miles wide, IS miles thick and IS miles high.
 But even that pile is too big for the eyes of a small mind like mine. Let us build up the coal into great fortifica- tions around our boundaries. There is coal enough in the ground to make wall a mile wide and half a mile high around the outside of the United States and leave some to spare. The length of our boundary. according to tho coast and geodetic survey, is less than n, 900 miles, and this wall of coal would be almost as much longer as the distance from New York to Chicago. Or we could cut the wall down ana run it around the United States in a series of Qualifications with wide trenches between. Suppose we made it 500 feet thick and 800 feet high, or as tall as the Washington monument. which no tank could ever climb over. The great wall of China. built to keep out the Mongols. is only 40 feet high. This wall would be 1 2 times higher. That wall at the top Is less than 25 feet wide; this wall would be 25 times thicker and it would be more than 400 times as long. It's ac- tual length would be more than 630000 miles. over twice as far as from here to the moon, with enough left to make gird1e six miles around the earth That wall would go so times around the whole United States. or we could build it up in 60 great walls, each as high as the Washington monument with factories and intuition plants between. With that wall we could make a line of Qualifications reach ing all the way between us and Can ada and all along the boundary which separates us from our sister republic of Mexico. We would have enough to extend the line back off the Pacific from the top of Puget Sound to lower California, and along the whole length of our Atlantic coast from northern most Maine to southernmost Florida. and border the Gulf of Mexico as we'll. Talk about the Hindenburg line! One fertilization of those 60, with it's great height and thickness. would be enough to keep out the Germans for all time to come.
 And now suppose we add to the wall the sn all amount of coal we have mined. If we should take every black diamond we have dug from the earth since our first mines were worked. near Richmond, Va. until now, the amount would extend the Qualifications less than 50 miles longer. It would cnly be four-tenths of per cent of the whole.
 Those figures are amazing. Neverthe- less. according to Dr. Campbell. they in- clude our coal to a depth of over 5000 feet and as the coal grows scarcer and scarcer we shall carry our mines down add 50 per cent to the estimates of our possible coal supply. and not be far out of the way.
 Moreover. tine coal fields of the above estimates include only those of the Cnted Statee rroper. They leave out the enormous coal beds we have in Alaska, some of which arc being opened up by the new railroad now building. We have both anthracite and bituminous coal there ani vast amount of Ignite, which A