Question: What kind of mines are the Giant Mine and the Discovery Mine?

In World War II, the United States Navy needed a vessel that could consistently locate mines in [foreign or domestic?]  or littoral waters.  Littoral waters are found between the shore line and waters 60 meters deep.  The Accentor-class minesweeper (sometimes called the Accentor/Acme-class minesweeper) was developed for this task.  This class of minesweeper was named after the Accentor bird, Prunella modularis.  This bird is endemic to Europe, Asia, and North Africa which is the area that World War II occurred.  The bird is a drab brown and gray color and is in the same family as warblers and thrushes.  The Accentor-class mine sweeper was designed for the sweeping of mines in harbors, bays, and other littoral waters.  The Accentor-class minesweeper had a wooden hull for three reasons.  The first was that some of the mines that the Accentor-class minesweeper was trying to detect were detonated by a copper wire coming out of the top of the mine that is used to detect the magnetic field that is produced by the metal hulls of most ships; when the wire senses a magnetic field, it detonates the mine.  Minesweepers use wooden hulls because wood is a non-magnetic material, unlike steel, and would not set off this type of mine.  The second is that wooden hulls were lighter than metal hulls.  This caused them to float higher in the water, which made them displace less water and have a smaller pressure wave, so pressure mines would not be set off by the movement of the ship.  Lastly, due to the ship floating higher in the water, contact mines were not effective because they were often around 20 feet below the surface of the water, and the draft of this class of ship was between 8 feet 11 inches and 10 feet 8 inches.  Typically, the Accentor-class minesweepers were armed with a pair of .50 caliber machine guns for protection.  Rather than creating new minesweeping vessels, forty-five wooden-hulled fishing boats were converted into Accentor-class minesweepers.  This saved the Navy both time and money.  Since these converted fishing boats were not all the same, their specifications do vary a bit.  The converted fishing boats had a displacement from 165 to 270 tons of water.  They had speeds from 8.5 up to 14 knots and crews from as small as 15 up to 50. <SEP> The P2 Mk2 and P3 Mk2 are Pakistani plastic cased minimum metal anti-tank blast mines.  The P2 Mk2 has a square case with a central circular ribbed pressure plate, the P3 is circular with a central circular pressure plate.  Both mines use anti-personnel mines as the fuse, typically the either the P4 Mk1 or P2 Mk2 anti-personnel mines.  The anti-personnel mine sits in a cavity below the pressure plate, when enough pressure is place on the pressure plate of the mine, it collapses onto the anti-personnel mine triggering it and the main charge which sits below it.  A yellow canvas carrying strap is normally fitted to the side of the mine.  The mines have a secondary fuse well on the bottom which can be used with anti-handling devices.  A GLM-2 electronic booby trap can be fitted to the cavity under the pressure plate.  The mine is supplied with a steel disc which makes the mine more easily detectable, although this is seldom used.  Since 1997 only a detectable version of the mine has been produced, and to comply with the Convention on Conventional Weapons amended protocol II, Pakistani stocks of the mine are being retrofitted with steel detection discs.  The mines are found in Afghanistan, Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Somalia, and Tajikistan. <SEP> The Giant Mine was a gold mine located on the Ingraham Trail, 5 km north of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.  Giant Mine is within the Kam Group, which is part of the Yellowknife greenstone belt.  Gold was discovered on the property and mineral claims staked in 1935 by Johnny Baker, but the true extent of the gold deposits were not known until 1944 when a massive gold-bearing shear zone was uncovered beneath the drift-filled Baker Creek Valley. <SEP>  Gold was discovered here by Alfred Giauque in 1944.  A complete townsite, on Giauque Lake, was established by the company to house workers and their families.  The mine produced one million troy ounces (31,000 kg) of gold from one million tons of ore.  The abandoned townsite, not accessible by road, was demolished in 2005. The Discovery Mine was a gold mine 81 kilometers northeast (approx bearing of 15 degrees) of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories that operated between 1950 and 1969.