Seismic tomography in Monte Sinni (Sardinia, Italy) coal mine

Thanks to new “clean coal technologies”, there is a renewed interest in coal and its exploitation: hence, to better evaluate a region’s potentiality, and the difficulties of coal extraction, it is important to define geometry, setting and thickness of the coal seams within the embedding rocks in detail. Geophysical methods, and in particular seismic tomography across the tunnels, may provide the requested information. This paper presents the results of a seismic tomographic survey done in 2006 in the Monte Sinni mine, SW Sardinia, Italy. The tomographic velocity field obtained is compared with the coal-lithologies thickness after coal extraction. We conclude that there is an inverse correlation between seismic velocity and amount of coal, which confirms the validity of the tomographic approach in such field, and encourages to further optimize the acquisition and analysis procedures to gain a greater understanding of the mineralized seam setting and of its lateral variations.