Talk:Race to save Chilean miners trapped underground from spiralling into depression continues

Graphics
There are a couple of interesting graphics at Chile mining accident that you might find useful in this article. --InfantGorilla (talk) 07:25, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Calculation of the drilling debris mass
From the Wikipedia English discussion page on: 2010 Copiapó mining accident.

Calculation of the volume of drilling debris to be evacuated by the miners themselves.

This is in fact the quarter or the half of the 3000 to 4000 tons erroneously reported in the WikiNews article:

Race to save Chilean miners trapped underground from spiralling into depression continues

"Quotation from WikiNews (as seen on September 4th, 2010)":
 * "But over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the "miners who have astonished the world with their discipline a half-mile underground will have to aid their own escape — clearing 3,000 to 4,000 tons of rock that will fall as the rescue hole is drilled, the engineer in charge of drilling said Sunday ..."

In fact, the miners will have to remove by themselves a total mass of fine rock debris (drilling cuttings) estimated between 700 and 1500 tons considering a borehole diameter of 70 cm or 1 m respectively, with a depth of 688 m and a rock density of 2.7 ton per cubic meter. See the table below for the volume and mass calculations easy to verify.

And it is already a large mass to be continuously evacuated by the miners.

Calculation of the drilling debris mass

Oops, I realized I was not logged on Wikinews and that I forgot to sign. Cheers, Shinkolobwe (talk) 17:57, 4 September 2010 (UTC)