Word: underground
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Inside the Bass house, Ford was preparing to veto some ecological legislation already passed by Congress. The strip mining bill he refused to sign called for regulating all strip mining and a 35-cent-per-ton excise tax on all surface-underground coal to pay for reclamation. Oddly enough, the measure would have cost Bass an estimated $100,000 annually because of his many mining leases...
...ancient copper-smelting operation of pre-Roman origin. Now, after excavating at the site with a team of West German mining experts, Israeli Archaeologist Beno Rothenberg reports that the slag is only the tip of an archaeological treasure. A short distance away, he says, is the oldest underground mining system ever found...
...traditional view is that the first really large-scale attempts at underground mining, in which extensive shafts and subterranean galleries were used, were not made until the time of the Romans, who mined everything from Spanish silver to British iron and Near Eastern copper. Rothenberg's discovery just about destroys that theory. From the stone hammers, bronze chisels and a cooking pot found in the labyrinthian tunnels of the Negev mine, he concludes that the mine dates back to 1400 B.C. -near the end of the Bronze Age and more than a millennium before Rome's large-scale...
...Underground Maze. Archaeologists once thought that Bronze Age people got their metals largely by chipping away at surface rocks; at most, they would tunnel only a few dozen feet. The newly discovered mine shows that the Bronze Age miners were far more skilled and adventurous than that. Located at the base of towering, 2,200-ft. red sandstone cliffs, the mine contains a complex, multilevel network of some 200 shafts and galleries. Although only a small portion has been excavated so far by Rothenberg's team, which included ten West German coal miners, the maze apparently reaches hundreds...
...strip mining, the bill required coal companies to restore mined land to its original contours and use, thereby limiting surface mining to areas where such reclamation was possible. Moreover, the bill would have extracted fees from the coal companies (35? per ton for surface mining, 25? per ton for underground mining) to finance restoration of the more than 1 million acres torn up by strip miners. One probable effect of the bill would have been the forced closing of a number of marginal surface mines in Appalachia...