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OK,
who knows anything about the Aerial deep scan programme being used for locating ship wrecks i have on good authority that it is used but i know little about it. actually thats a lie i know nothing about it.

 

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I have no idea but this could be something related.

Aerial scans provide picture of acid mine pollution in Youghiogheny


Photo Gallery

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The equipment dangles from a helicopter
Courtesy National Energy Technology Laboratory

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Magnetic-imaging electronics are kept in a tube
Courtesy National Energy Technology Laboratory

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This aerial view shows Sewickley Creek
Courtesy National Energy Technology Laboratory

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Terry Ackman
Jerry Storey/Tribune-Review

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James Sams
Jerry Storey/Tribune-Review

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Acid mine drainage
Courtesy National Energy Technology Laboratory

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Thermal scans of the Youghiogheny River
Courtesy National Energy Technology Laboratory
Sewickley Creek Watershed map






By Jerry Storey
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, January 26, 2003


Airborne technology is being used to develop a clearer picture of acid mine drainage in the Youghiogheny River and other area watersheds.
Helicopters outfitted with electronic instruments have been used like high-flying divining rods to map the flow of ground water.

The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Bruceton, in Allegheny County, has worked with a number of state and federal agencies and grassroots environmental groups to compile the data, with hopes of using it both to remedy decades of pollution and to better understand the flow of increasingly precious groundwater.

There are a lot of mysteries big and small to be solved.





Theodore Alisantrino, 77, a former Connellsville council member and longtime observer of the area, for example, noticed something odd about the section of the Youghiogheny River near the Route 119 bridge during low flow in the summers. "You see a checkerboard pattern," he said.

He wonders if the pattern has something to do with the old Davison coal mine which had at least one tunnel that ran underneath the river. At another site near the city's sewage plant there is a whirlpool that might just have been caused by a cave-in beneath the riverbed.

The Youghiogheny is pure enough to be a major source of drinking water as well as a recreational asset to the region, but Terry Ackman, head of the clean water team at the laboratory, who oversaw the airborne scans of the river, points out that it is "a fragile system."

Numerous coal mines peppered the banks of the river, which was at the heart of the Connellsville Coal and Coke Region at the turn of the century. Strip mines near the river also added pollution to the Youghiogheny.

Drainage from a number of different mines has migrated both through open passageways and rock formations into the river.

Bruce Golden, regional coordinator for the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, said there is "a vast maze of interconnected mine voids."

He cites a geologic formation that formed a bowl in the river near West Newton in Westmoreland County, where the drainage has pooled.

An aerial scan of the Youghiogheny River was first suggested five years ago at a conference at Penn State University's Fayette campus, sponsored by the private Youghiogheny River Council, and attended by a number of officials from state and federal environmental agencies. Representatives of the U.S. Naval Warfare Center discussed how technology developed to locate explosive mines in the ocean could be used to find the coal mine openings in the Youghiogheny River.

The proposal for the scan won the support of those at the session, and the Department of Energy contracted with Becthel Nevada, a company that already does work for the DOE at a Nevada site where nuclear weapons were once tested.

Four years ago, the federal researchers supervised an overflight from Connellsville to McKeesport for an infrared thermal scan of the Youghiogheny River and the Sewickley Creek Watershed. That helicopter flew at night at an altitude of 13,500 feet.

Last summer, area residents awoke to see what looked like a large torpedo dangling from a cable on a helicopter about 100 feet above the river. Packed in the 30-foot-long tube were the components for an electromagnetic system to scan deep under the river bed.

Although David Anna, a lab spokesman, said that in the wake of the terrorist's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, officials were concerned the sight of the helicopter might frighten residents, advance publicity of the flight averted any problems.

The data from the flights provided only a portion of the information needed to understand what lies beneath the waterways.

The thermal scan found the hot spots in the river between Connellsville and McKeesport. It showed some discharges of as little as a gallon a minute, according to Ackman, but it couldn't differentiate between acid mine drainage and such natural occurrences as springs.

Ackman said that was OK since the effort wasn't only about identifying mine drainage, but also understanding the flow of groundwater. "Water is becoming a very large issue in this country," he said.

He pointed out that by lessening acid mine pollution in the Youghiogheny River, less flow would have to be released from the Yough reservoir to dilute it.

The federal researchers used coordinates from the airborne thermal scan to identify and photograph the sites on the ground. Back at the lab, they "geo-rectified," or "geo-referenced" this information in their words, essentially matching up longitudes and latitudes with the numerous past studies of the waterways. "That was the hard part," Ackman said.

James Sams, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey on loan to the lab, is using all this information to build a database that displays layers upon layers of maps and graphics.

Sams said, with this database all the information would be cataloged and organized, "rather than lost in some field inspector's notebook."

'Hopefully this database will provide information for a long time for doing remediation or land-use planning," he said.

All of the layers can be downloaded into a hand-held Palm Pilot. Used in conjunction with a Global Positioning System, those in the field know exactly where they stand.

Placing the information in a visual context makes it far easier for people to understand than tables of technical information, said Golden. And the laboratory plans to make the information available on the Internet soon.

Electromagnetic scan

The airborne electromagnetic scan last summer added another layer to the picture.

While the thermal scan showed where mine drainage discharged from the waterway, it couldn't show where the river flowed into the mine voids.

This is important information because it may be possible to prevent water from flowing into polluted mine voids by grouting cracks in the riverbed.

Pat Trimble, former mayor of Dawson in Fayette County and former chairman of the board of the Regional Trail Corp., said "finding the holes" could save 20 to 30 years in cleaning up the Youghiogheny.

Electromagnetic imaging is not a new technology. Richard W. Hammack, a research geochemist at the lab, said that the components slung from the helicopter worked on the same basic principle as those in a hand-held metal detector. A transmitter sent an electromagnetic field into the riverbed, and a receiver measured its conductivity when it bounced back. In addition to the electromagnetic scan of the Youghiogheny River, the helicopter also did scans of the Kettle Creek watershed near Lock Haven in Clinton County and the Wheeling Creek watershed near St. Clairsville, Ohio.

The helicopter was operated by Fugro Airborne Surveys Corp. of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Although the technology has been used routinely to locate minerals, Ackman said this was the first flight he was aware of in which it was used to map groundwater.

The flight and study were paid for with a $100,000 grant awarded through the state Department of Environmental Protection's Growing Greener program. The Penn's Corner Resource Conservation Service ? an agency comprised of representatives from nine southwestern Pennsylvania counties and affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture ? was the official grant applicant.

The aerial survey of Kettle Creek was more complete, Ackman acknowledged, than the survey of the Youghiogheny. The river had more bridges and power lines that the pilot had to fly around.

In addition to reaching down to formations under the waterway, the electromagnetic scan found additional hot spots that had been masked from the thermal scan by the canopies of trees. Another geologic feature that turned up at Kettle Creek and surprised Sams was a "fern bog," that featured an entirely different type of plant than the cattails of most wetlands.

The federal researchers plan to add to their database by floating down the Youghiogheny this spring in a custom rubber raft equipped with a electromagnetic system and guided by a Global Positioning System.

Although using airborne scans to locate groundwater is a new application for the technology, Hammack sees a time when it will become standard procedure.

Golden said that remediation efforts would be expensive, and that a time and date when the data from the flyovers would be put to practical use in the Youghiogheny River would depend upon funding.

The recent disaster at Quecreek Mine in Somerset County, where nine miners were trapped for 77 hours after they cut into a flooded abandoned mine, brings to light another promising use of the technology.

Airborne scans may be able to locate water for the safety of the miners as well as for determining possible environmental impacts to streams and other waterways. To go that deep into mine pools, however, Hammack said yet another scanning system known as time domain electromagnetic measurement may be needed. The system uses more power and switches between transmitting and receiving of the magnetic field to reduce interference between the two. (A search of the Internet, reveals that time domain scanning is being proposed as part of the Mars Surveyor Program 2003 to explore the subsurface of the Red Planet.)

Ackman said the laboratory in Pittsburgh is also working on other research to remediate pollution. One project is a small pilot program to determine if the water from mine pools can be used to cool electric power plants, thereby saving innumerable gallons of fresh water for other uses. In addition, the lab is looking at using sewage to help treat acid mine drainage.

Meanwhile, the federal researchers, with the help of geology graduate students from the University of Pittsburgh, continue to examine the data they've already collected.

Ackman said the project has generated interest in the geophysical community. The researchers are to present a paper on the program at a conference in San Antonio, and graphics from the scans illustrate the cover of the program of another conference in San Diego.


Jerry Storey can be reached at [email protected] or (724) 626-3581.