How to Use coal seam in a Sentence

coal seam

noun
  • Or rather, the coal seam under what used to be the town of Centralia was burning.
    Carrie Arnold, WIRED, 21 Apr. 2019
  • In fact, not a single coal seam has been found in rocks of this vintage anywhere in the world.
    Chris Mays, Scientific American, 23 June 2022
  • Beyond the bridge the road twisted past soft cliffs smoking with burning coal seams.
    New York Times, 18 Feb. 2020
  • Many researchers believe the disease’s new intensity stems in part from the size of the coal seams being mined.
    Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 16 May 2017
  • After the coal seams were depleted the site was left flattened, carved with dirt roads and stripped of vegetation.
    Leslie Nemo, Scientific American, 11 July 2018
  • The Powder River Basin, which plays host to massive coal seams and some of the world's largest coal mines, lies mainly in Wyoming and in recent years has churned out 40% of the country's product.
    Mark Olalde, USA TODAY, 10 Apr. 2020
  • The method involves digging vertical pits down into a hillside, until the coal seam is reached.
    Krishna Pokharel, WSJ, 30 Dec. 2018
  • Eventually, this carbon-rich system transformed into the thick coal seams mined around the world today.
    Deming Wang, National Geographic, 8 Aug. 2019
  • These passages allowed the fire to spread to the coal seam underneath the town and expand along four fronts, eventually affecting a surface area about two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.
    Kristin Ohlson, Discover Magazine, 3 Jan. 2011
  • New gas source Geologists had suspected there was methane gas buried in Australia’s vast coal seams.
    Rachel Pannett, WSJ, 10 July 2017
  • Then, in 1959, miners working coal seams broke through the bed of the Susquehanna river, which flowed into the caverns below like bathwater swirling down a plughole.
    The Economist, 21 Oct. 2017
  • Recently, there has been a resurgence of severe cases of the disease in Appalachian mines, thought in part to be caused by thinner coal seams and more powerful equipment that kicks up more dust.
    Washington Post, 11 July 2018
  • The mine operator has drilled at least two emergency boreholes into the mine to sample its air and craft a plan for putting out the fire smoldering in a coal seam, hopefully without destroying the mine in the process.
    Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 25 Oct. 2022
  • Bomfleur was looking at several such cocoons that had been collected in 2005, from a coal seam beneath an Antarctic mountain.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 4 Dec. 2012
  • It was followed by a second unconventional resource called coalbed methane (coal seam gas in Australia).
    Ian Palmer, Forbes, 18 Oct. 2021
  • If a coal seam burns through the road, asphalt could crack open and sink, swallowing people and cars and unleashing a hellish scenario that might finally make people pay attention to what is going on beneath their feet.
    Kristin Ohlson, Discover Magazine, 3 Jan. 2011
  • In the late 20th century, state officials approved new strip mining practices that allowed companies to blast away at the summits of West Virginia mountains to gain easier access to coal seams.
    Keith Schneider, ProPublica, 31 July 2019
  • In the decades since, silica dust has become a major problem as Appalachian miners cut through layers of sandstone to reach less accessible coal seams in mountaintop mines where coal closer to the surface has long been tapped.
    Leah Willingham and Matthew Daly, Anchorage Daily News, 25 July 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'coal seam.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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