Fires raging below ground in India鈥檚 coal mines are being detected and tracked by satellite.
More than 70 fires are burning in the 450 square kilometres of the Jharia coal fields in northern India, making life hard for the villagers who live above them. Fires can burn for decades, until all the coal is exhausted. One fire has been burning since 1916.
The conventional ground-based surveys needed till now are difficult and time-consuming. 鈥淪atellites allow us to look deep into these inaccessible areas,鈥� says Rashi Agarwal at the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute in Kanpur, India. Her team used free thermal-imaging data from satellites belonging to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to pick out the underground fires (Journal of Geophysics and Engineering, vol 3, p 212).
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Measurements by the satellites鈥� Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers are updated daily, so geophysicists can use them to monitor the fires鈥� progress. This can locate a fire to within an area of 1 square kilometre; ground surveys are still needed to locate them more precisely.
鈥淰illagers live on intensely hot ground, with thick fumes and smoke coming up through cracks in the surface,鈥� says Anupma Prakash, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, who visited Jharia recently. 鈥淗igher-resolution satellites could potentially detect the fires with more accuracy,鈥� she says. This could provide a valuable head start when it comes to tackling them.
