Abstract

Ground Subsidence Due to Mine Drift of Shaft Collapse in Butte, MT
Track: Mining and Geosciences
Authors: Christopher Smith, Paul Thale, Paul Thale

Ground subsidence due to mine drift or shaft collapse is important to underground-mining communities around the world. Digitizing and georeferencing historic mine maps from local coordinate systems into global coordinate systems, performing elevation corrections, and spatial analysis can lead to the identification of areas susceptible to subsidence. Butte, Montana has over 5500 miles of mine drifts below its ground surface which lends to the importance of properly georeferencing the data.