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Comment by fromthestart | Hacker News Reader

> It is estimated that more than two hundred square miles of coal has burned

Why would they measure the amount burned in square miles??? How thick? This measurement is meaningless!

Well, coal is mostly carbon and its atomic radius is around 70pm. Converting miles to metric and calculating based on that, we can assume at minimum 72 liters of coal was burned, but not more than the total volume of earth.

i lol

Granted, it's not a measure of how much coal has been burned, but it is a measure of how far the fire has spread.

They measure it in square miles because it's most direct impact on our way of life is at the surface. The thickness is unlikely to be uniform and the volume of the coal doesn't exactly tell the lay person much.

It may not be possible to know or accurately estimate the scope of it.

At only 200 square miles, we can fix it. Assuming the area is square, the perimeter is just 56.56 miles. We can go around with a tunnel boring machine, replacing coal with a concrete-lined tube. We can dig a trench, like a road cut or canal, lining it just as we sometimes line our road cuts and canals.

Yeah only 200 square miles

The best case is a circle, giving a perimeter of 50 miles. Some other projects to compare it by:

94 miles total for the three bores of the Channel Tunnel

120 miles for the Suez canal, finished 149 years ago

51 miles for the Panama canal, finished 104 years ago with steam shovels

Clearly, we can do this.

If it were laid out on an identifiable surface, then perhaps that could be done. But veins of coal in the earth branch unpredictably in 3D space. You'd be following a fractal surface.

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