Stuff You Should Know - How Underground Mining Works

Episode Date: June 28, 2016

People used to use deer antlers to beat the minerals out of rock hidden in the earth. Luckily, they got better at it, and now modern mining is a mind-boggling process for efficiently removing stuff we want from inside the planet. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, looking chipper and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

There's Jerry over there, she's dressed like Snow White, some birds flying around the place. Wow. It's like all the stuff you should know. It's like Disney all up in here. Why not? Which, by the way, we learned. The hard way.

Well, I might be in Gilbert, so I'll mess it up again. That's good. So, Chuck. Yeah. Have you ever been inside an underground mine? No. Do you remember our episode where we talked about what happens to a band in mine?

Yeah, boy, did we do a show on that? Old timey. Crazy old. It was a good one, if I remember correctly. Okay. Yeah, and then we've also done one on mountaintop removal mining with Ben Soli. Yeah.

That was a good one, too. Yep. This one's totally different. We did fracking, too. Oh, yeah, we did do fracking. But the frick is fracking, didn't it? Yeah. Wasn't that what it was called?

It's one of our better titles. But this one's totally different. This is underground mining. Yes. This is what people normally think of with mining, rather than stripping the top off of a mountain or fracking. This is mining.

Yeah, and you usually don't think about mining much as a regular person walking around on a day-to-day basis, unless there's some sort of accident. And that will usually cause regular folk to say, oh, yeah, right. People still go underground and mine, and it can be very dangerous. They're like, how terrible.

No, back to life. Uh, like in 2010 in Chile, remember that? No, that one was huge. Yeah, well, they got those dudes. They did. And there's, I think, a movie coming out, or already out. From that mistaken, Antonio Bandettis. Oh, yeah?

I think so. Too sexy. Yeah, that's a one sexy miner. Do you remember that entire life? Oh, you don't remember the Antonio Bandettis? How do you say? Oh. Ah, yes, sure.

Yeah, that's right. I remember that now. Did someone played him, though, right? Or was he on it? Yeah, I'm sure he guessed it at least once. But yeah, I think it was Chris Catan. I think you're exactly right. The least sexy guy of all time.

Actually. We're sorry, Mr. Catan, but it's true. I think he would admit that. No, I think he likes himself. He doesn't care what we say. What was that crazy character he used to do, the monkey boy? Yeah, that was very funny. I don't know, mango is different than the monkey boy.

Mango is like this super sexy flamenco dancer down in Miami or something that every people would give up their lives for and just be around. Mango wasn't the one who ate fruit. It's all crazy. No. All right. I don't remember.

God rest his soul. Who? Chris Catan? I'm just kidding. Oh, OK. Well, you can still. Does that have to mean you're dead? Or can God just rest your soul?

I guess. He needs a break. I think there's a sense of finality to that. When God rests your soul, I think your soul has been. R.I.P. You can still rest in peace by taking a nice nap. So yes, in Chile, it was a disaster in 2010 that turned out with a great ending, because like I said, they're all rescued in.

But they spent 68 days underground. Yeah, in a little room. Crazy, man. Which probably smelled a lot like pee when they were finally taken out of there. Yeah, it's a long time. I mean, that's remarkable. I believe the room was designed as an escape room or something.

So it worked like it was supposed to. Right. But they had to dig like an escape hatch. They had to dig down to these miners, hundreds of feet under the ground. Yeah. Which in and of itself put their life in danger, I'm sure. Right.

And that happened in 2010. And Julia Layton, who wrote this article, points out that that was a, as far as mining goes, that was a bad year. Yeah. So there were those guys, like 33 were rescued, but a bunch of their compatriots were killed in that same disaster, I believe.

Well, yeah. And I think she also makes a great point that the disaster gets all the headlines. But people die all the time individually or in several dudes at once that doesn't hit the headlines. Right. Like a couple of guys die on the job in a day. Right.

And regionally, you might hear about on the news, but it's not going to sweep the nation. Right. Like a big disaster. And apparently also, things like Black Lung are still around, even though they shouldn't be. Yeah. And I was reading that these deaths,

although they're preventable, they are the deaths of people who live in rural communities outside of the spotlight or the media. Yeah. And so it still happens. So yeah, the point is, underground mining in particular is extremely dangerous. I have a question for you, though.

I was looking at pictures of modern mining operations. And guys are down there without even a dust mask on. I noticed that, too. And I'm just thinking that seems to be the most preventable thing you can do is wear the, like we're anywhere in the things the firefighters wear with the tank and the full mask, face mask. The closest thing I can come to for an answer

is that the mine owners are supposed to have that place so ventilated that you wouldn't even need that. Supposed to. I don't know about that. But I mean, like in 1969, Congress said, there should not be Black Lung anymore. We want it eradicated from the mining industry.

Since then, 76,000 miners have died from Black Lung. But apparently it's totally preventable. It's just mine owners being cheap and or lazy. Right. And I guess, I mean, when was this done? When did they? 1969. Oh, yeah.

OK, well, you could have stats of people that theoretically started their career after that. And I'm sure they should not have Black Lung. Sure. But they're definitely people who weren't even born then that died of Black Lung. Right. You know, since then.

All right, well, we're talking about underground mining, though, as you pointed out to Jerry when she said mining. And you were underground mining. Big difference. To sound like that, I've got a lot of self-reflection to do. But surface mining is different. And that is a very viable way to get ore if you only want to go down, and that's a top-down op.

That's like mountaintop removal. Yeah, if you want to go down a couple hundred feet, it's a good way to get some ore. Below that, the efficiencies, it becomes inefficient. So they say, well, why don't we get down there? Yeah, go to the source. We're working our way up. Right.

That's what they do. Or at least maybe just go get that big chunk of ore that's 1,000 feet down. And did you see this thing about kind of the early history of mining? Yeah. Should we do that? Yeah, man.

When you talk about going like 1,000 feet down, or how far does the uranium mine go down to? 6,500 feet. That's mind-bogglingly deep. That's more than a mile, right? Isn't a mile something like in the neighborhood of 5,000 feet? I have no idea. I think it is.

It's something like that, right? So that's a very deep amount. Sure. But that's using machines and mechanization, which we'll talk about. So if you go around the world and find some of these ancient mines, like Roman mines or Egyptian mines, they're the first ones to really get into mining.

Although they're prehistoric mines that date back to the Neolithic age, them going down like 100 feet or so, that's pretty impressive. Oh, yeah. And they're working in something like three or four meters a month of an advance rate. Yeah, because they're using pickaxes. They were using pickaxes.

And slave labor and prisoners of war. Criminals, basically. So the conditions, as you would imagine, were terrible because they didn't care. No, they were like, go ahead and die. We'll just go conquer another land and make them mine. Exactly. But as that source of employees dried up

and they had fewer and fewer prisoners of war, because they'd conquered everyone, they said, well, maybe this is a real job and we should make it safer. Yeah, like pay some probably still unskilled yokels. But at least they could pay. Egyptian yokels? Yeah, but they weren't prisoners of war and slaves,

so they wanted to pay them a little money, not much, and make it a little bit safer. No, and as a result, the occupation of mining became more respected and respectable. Because it's a pretty hardcore occupation and one that should be admired and respected, especially if you're talking about back in the day when they're using pickaxes and stuff.

Yeah, your article that you sent was pre-1600. And for hundreds and hundreds of years, it kind of stayed the same. And the Egyptians kind of set the standard and everyone followed suit. And they would dig down with pickaxes and shovels made of, depends everything from bone to when they finally got metal from mining, they would use metal.

It kind of was like a cycle. They also very cleverly, and apparently this is a really old technique, they would use, I think it was called fire quenching? Yeah, that says fire setting or fire quenching. Let's just say they would heat up rock with fire and then throw water on it. Yeah, and if you've ever done that,

you can see a rock will crack pretty quickly. Because of that change in temperature, that really rapid change in temperature. Not safe. No, no it's not, because that rock can go flying. Yeah, especially in 5th century Rome. Yeah, and they were also using it not just to hurry along. It was basically their version of drilling and blasting

before there was drills or blast equipment. And they would also use it not just to drill or blast or break up ore, they were doing it so they could free their axes or picks that would get stuck in the rock. So yeah, that thing could come flying out and hit you. But again, you were most likely a prisoner of ore, a slave or a convicted criminal who was not only using a very cheap pick to break up rock all day,

there's a guy behind you lashing you with a whip to egg you on and keep you standing upright. Yeah, and it is weird. I just thought about the cycle, like they kind of, I mean they used metal for other things, but they were kind of mining to just improve their own equipment for more mining. Yeah, right.

And the discovery of more metals. Like initially they wanted, I think, flint for tools and weapons, but they were using bone. And then eventually they were like, oh, well we found copper. So we'll use copper to dig and like, oh, well now we found bronze. Right. And then all the way up to.

Wait, we found some iron. Now let's use iron. Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah, and each time it was like a snake eating its own tail. They just go do some more mining with the new stuff. That's right. And so like you said, that was pretty much

the early history of mining and it stayed virtually the same until the age of mechanization, the industrial age. But even after the industrial age, people were still using ancient mining techniques. Yeah, TNT. Yeah. Well, that's not that ancient.

But blasting and I think what they say in this article, like 5% of mining today is the blast technique. It's mostly mechanized, right? Yeah. Well, you want to take a break? Yeah, man. Okay, and we'll come back and talk about mechanized mining techniques right after this.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so no two minds are the same. Well, that's probably not true. I bet you there's two minds that are the same.

Exactly the same. But there are different kinds of minds. And, but most of them have a few common characteristics. You got to have your ventilation shafts. You got to have your access shafts for the employees. You got to have exit shafts for the, or, there's a lot of shafts. So many shafts, man.

So many shafts. There's, did you say vent shafts? To vent away the stuff? Yeah, that's number one. Recovery shafts that the ore goes up out of. Yeah, comm systems. Break room. Yeah, break room.

Escape rooms. Yeah, escape rooms. That kind of stuff. Totally. And the, but I think the point of Layton here is that the ore deposit itself is going to tell you what kind of underground mining technique you want to use, right?

Yeah, like the, what the ore actually is, what it's shape like. Is it like a big flat slab? Is it a big, huge blob? What kind of rock is around it? Are you mining petroleum, Jelly? Well, you raised a question, Chuck. I could not find this to save my life.

So there's two types of underground mines, right? Okay. There's hard rock mines and soft rock mines. Yeah. There's Soundgarden and Steely Dan. I had docking and bread. Did you really? Yeah.

And, wow, is docking metal? Yeah, ish. But see, that's the thing, hard rock or metal. That's a fine line sometimes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Soundgarden. I think bread, how about Soundgarden and bread? Okay.

Look at us. Soundgarden bread. Working together. So I couldn't figure out if that is meant to describe the ore, the type of thing that's being mined, or the rock surrounding the ore. I saw both. If you...

Now what now? Oh, for the harder soft? Right. Oh. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I think I assumed it was the ore, but you may be right. Maybe it's...

So Layton says, for example, coal deposits live in relatively soft sedimentary rock. Right. Which would make you think that she's saying that it's the rock that's around the ore. That's soft. Yeah. I think that that would be a soft rock mine

that is not dependent on the type of ore you're getting out. I saw it elsewhere. I saw that what she was saying being supported in other places, but I also saw, no, it has to do with... It describes the ore that's being removed. So if there's any miners out there that can tell us the difference,

definitively, we wanna know. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get a wonderful follow-up email. But the point is, depending on whether you've determined it's a hard rock mine or a soft rock mine, that's going to also inform, not just the where the ore is and the size and shape of the ore deposit, but whether it's hard rock or soft rock

is gonna determine what type of mining technique you wanna use. Yeah, it seems like there's more hard rock mines than soft. They was gold, diamonds, copper, silver, zinc, and nickel as hard rock. And the only mention of soft is coal. Yeah. But there's a lot of coal mining going on.

So maybe, you know. Tons. Literally tons. Right. So let's talk a little bit about hard rock mining. It really helps, I found, to look at either cross sections, like if you look up room and pillar mining, there's always a great cross section diagram.

I love those. That kind of brings it home. You know, looking at this stuff, I saw you watching a video that I saw too. It brings out the little boy who loved honka trucks in me again. Like, this stuff is really neat. Yeah, you're, well, we'll get there.

The continuous miner. Yeah, that's definitely part of it. But also like trucks driving underground and like going beep, beep, beep, fill me up blue. Yeah, just awesome. All right, so room and pillar is for a flat or deposit that doesn't, let's say like,

oh, it starts at 200 feet and goes down to 1,000 more feet. It's more horizontal and flat. And this is where, basically you use this machine called a continuous miner. And they say it drills, but maybe that's the terminology. But when I think of drill, I think of something long drilling a hole into something.

This looks like a boxy tank with a huge metal dustpan at the bottom and a huge rolling pin with teeth on it at the top. And a big appetite for coal. Yeah. And when I say rolling pin, it's like, kind of like a bulldozer, you can raise and lower it. And you just drive that thing through earth.

Right. And you're a coal deposit. But you leave these pillars. So you basically clear out a huge room with these big pillars left to keep you from dying. I find the terms room and pillar, they're kind of misleading because it makes you think that the room is going to be vast.

And then there's these little kind of supports that are left behind. And that's not the case at all. The pillars are huge. They're enormous. From what I saw, they're frequently bigger than the room itself. And they're left behind to keep the rock above

from crumbling in, right? Yeah, that's still got to be scary. So, oh yeah, I'm sure. Like this is extremely dangerous work, you know? So I mean, you're hollowing out inside a mountain. That's super dangerous. Well, I mean, when I did my one caving experience a few years ago.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. And I was in, there was this one, I think they called it a pancake crawl or something where for 20 feet, you have to shimmy on your back with the world's largest stone slab. Right. Five inches above your face. And I just kept thinking like,

what if the earth moved a little? Oh yeah. This thing just smashed me flat. You'd be a pancake yourself. And that's one of the dangers is trimmers and things. Sure. Underground trimmers. Have you been to Rock City?

Yeah, when I was a kid. So, in a while. You know, there's like that enormous rock that's being held up very precariously by a small boulder. You're walking under that same thing. I don't need to go caving. I can just go to Rock City and tempt fate. Yeah.

And then you can go to Stuckeys and buy a pecan log after work. Love those. Yes. Very few don't know Rock City as a Tennessee, right? Yeah, Chattanooga. Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's very beautiful area.

It's our version of Carl's Bad Caverns. You've got Rock City. Well, it's super kitschy. There's like 1930s glow in the dark gnomes everywhere. Yeah, it's really interesting. Cool. And then you've got Ruby Falls. Yeah.

When you walk underground and you come into a cavern and there's the water coming down. Very pretty. And then there's also like Lookout Mountain. It's beautiful. Yeah. Definitely worth going to. Not too far from your beloved Dollywood.

Yeah, it's not far. So, the point is with the Ruma Pillar, right? You're basically your Pac-Man or your Dig Dug. Dig Dug, yeah. Going through a coal seam. And then that space you just carved out is called a room. When you come back through, you leave a big space in between of coal.

And then come back through again. And that's another room. So, what's in between those two rooms now is the pillar. It's just the strip of coal that you left intact. Yeah, and they will come in at the very end and even take care of those pillars one by one, allowing everything to collapse as it leaves. Yeah.

Which sounds probably like the most dangerous phase is knocking the pillars down. They're like, make Todd do it. He's in the break room having a nap. Go wake him up. That's why they, he always sleeps on the job. Did you see that picture of Richard Branson? Like squatting next to one of like a Virgin Airlines employee

like sleeping on a couch in the break room. He's like squatting next to him giving the thumbs up. What was his whole thing? Cause he's like the boss of all bosses of this guy. And he's like, that's your job. No, he's saying like, I busted you sleeping on. Oh, gotcha. It sounded staged.

It was a real thing. Supposedly, yeah. Did he stick his hands in hot water and make him pee pee himself? It's like true. Jenna Taylor on the guy's face was sharp. He put toothpaste on his hand and tickled his nose. He's a fun loving boss.

All right, so that's room and pillar. There's also the cut and fill method, which I don't fully understand. It is for narrow deposits. And you basically drill a ramp adjacent to the deposit from the surface of the earth down to the bottom of it. Right. And then you start.

At the bottom. At the bottom and just start drilling sideways. Yeah, so imagine like the ore deposit is just like a big tall rectangle. Okay. Okay, in the earth going upwards. It's a vertical ore deposit. Yeah.

You just go down to the bottom, you make a cut across where you're digging out the coal. From one side to all the way to the other. All the way to the other, right? And then you backfill that with rock, rubble, that say you gathered when you made the initial shaft down to the bottom. And then you drive on that backfill to do the next thing.

So you fill the entire room you just did with rubble. And then when you cut above that, you're using that rubble to drive on. And then you do the same thing again. Yep, just up and up and up. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. That's pretty good one.

And if you imagine a big yellow truck doing it, it can just send you barreling right back to age four or five. I didn't play a ton with Tonka trucks. Yeah, I had a few. There was also like Richard scary was really good at drawing stuff like that. It was sucking the end of that universe. Those books were great.

But I was big on, I had that evil, an evil stunt cycle that was just amazing. Yeah. Like that was my toy of choice for like probably three or four years. I can imagine. Yeah. I used to, my brother and I made,

don't try this at home, kids. This is the 70s. We were much more dangerous. We would make hoops out of coat hangers and dip them in gasoline. I was really, really hoping that you were gonna say a ring of fire. Yeah, when we would jump the evil Knievel through it.

That's really awesome. Yeah. Man, I really missed out on having a Scott of my own. Yeah. It's good to have Scott around. Yeah. He's gonna be at our New York shows, by the way. Oh, great.

Just randomly gonna be in New York. Same exact time. He's coming to both of them? Actually, I don't know if he's gonna come to the show. He was going to, but then I said, it's the same topic you've already seen. Oh. So he said, yeah.

Anyway, back to Cut and Fill. You can use it for wider deposits as well. You just have to have two adjacent ramps. I guess you have one on each side. Yeah. I didn't really get that aside from maybe it's, it's a, they're just crisscrossing each other. I think that's what they're doing.

One above the other. That seems really dangerous. Yeah. Well, it's all dangerous. All right. Let's talk more about Scott. What about block caving? This one is, you don't see it a lot now.

It's for hard rock excavations. And basically it's not for like precious metal or anything. It's for low grade junk. So I saw that here, but then I also saw like videos of, that sounded a lot like this. It seemed a lot like this too. So I don't know if it's just for junk or whatever. Oh, really?

Yeah. It's, it's basically where you cut through and then you let the roof collapse behind you. Yeah. You dig out a room and then blast it and let it just fall in on itself. And then you haul that stuff out. Yeah. I guess you wouldn't care about the, the stuff you're recovering like that much. Obviously it's worth going into the earth and retrieving it.

Yeah. But I guess it's not high grade, you know what I mean? That's right. So coal, like we said, is softer and that is usually room and pillar style. But now there's the thing called long wall mining. It is all the rage in the break room. Yeah.

Of the mining. So it's really efficient. They get out a 90% of available ore with this method where room and pillar is only about 50%, which is a huge diff. Right. So we said, that we were talking about hard rock mining, right? With the room and pillar works for hard rock mining

and soft rock. Yeah. It crosses over. But then the cut and fill, that's just for hard rock, right? Correct. Okay. And then long wall, that's just for soft rock basically. I think so, yes.

So long wall, yeah. That's the one where I'm like, oh man, this is so cool. Yeah. The machine, it's pretty awesome. How much those machines cost? Well, I don't know. A lot. Like four or 500 bucks, easy. Easy at least.

It's really neat. You're not drilling into a single deposit through the deposit. Right. You basically have a machine that just kind of, it's sort of a cross cut and just shaves it off as you go. And onto a conveyor belt, just constantly moving the stuff out.

Right. Rather than drilling through, going forward or backward, you're going left to right. Yeah. So what you would do is you drill a shaft down to the ore deposit. And then you drill a shaft that's parallel to the face of it, right?

That goes from left to right. And then you go down and you bring in your long wall machine, which is apparently up to 800 feet long. Yeah. Costs $500. Right. And each part of this machine, which sounds like it's modular, like you can make it shorter or longer or whatever,

and they just hook up to one another. It's like a hydraulic jack that holds the roof of the mountain up above it. Yes. And then on the front. It provides its own support. Yeah. And then on the front of it is where the coal eater is, the sole eater.

Amazing. This thing in action is really cool looking. Yeah, it really is. Because when you're watching videos of it, it looks, you just see it from the side and it looks like, oh, okay. It's going to go straight. And then all of a sudden,

the coal eater shoots off out of sight, further back into the ore deposit. And as it does that, it drops that coal down to a conveyor belt in the front of the thing. And it shoots the coal off to the shaft that raises it up. Amazing. It is very amazing.

And there's another method called short wall. And it's the same thing. It's just for shorter cuts when it's a narrow deposit. Right. And then after the cut is made, the thing advances a little further and the roof behind it caves in. Amazing.

I'm a big long wall fan. What about you? I like the room and pillar. Really? Mm-hmm. Because it's the machine. Oh, okay. The continuous miner.

Well, I think that's why I like the long wall is because of the mining machine. They should have named the continuous miner, the John Henry. Yeah. Just, you know, out of respect like a throwback. Well, he was a railroad guy. Who was the guy who had the...

Casey at the bat. No, wasn't it John Henry who had the contest against the... The steam machine. But I think they were... Was it a railroad? I know what you're talking about. I thought it was like a steel driving man. Oh, right.

He was driving spikes. Yeah. What was the one that was digging into a rock? I know what you're talking about, though. And I feel like they were trying to build a train tunnel, too. I'm gonna look this up during the break. Okay. And we'll come back with the answer.

How about that? Let's do it. It's called a cliffhanger. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, it is John Henry. Wow, he did it all. He did it all. He was the steel driving man, like you said, but here was the deal. He hammered the steel drill into rock to make the railroad tunnel.

So it was railroading and mining. Gotcha. Or not mining. Where's the best of both worlds? Well, do you call that mining or just tunneling? It's tunneling. Man, that's a good question. No, I don't think it's mining.

Mining is specifically getting ore. Right. Tunneling is just blasting a hole through something. OK, tunneling. That was another good episode we did. Tunnels. Did we do that one too? Yeah.

Jeez. Man. Starting to lose it. Yeah, I like our civil engineering episodes, too. Is that a tronch we have? Sure, we've done bridges, tunnels, mining a couple of times, some other stuff. Yeah.

I guess landfills would probably qualify. Yeah. I could probably come up with more, but we should move on. You want to talk about the dangers of mining, Chuck? Yeah, well, they're rampant. Well, first of all, it can be bad for Mother Earth. Yeah, just a tad. Just a little bit.

We're talking, you're changing the physical makeup of the earth beneath our feet. So there's got to be ramifications. Air pollution, of course, is one. How water flows, the water table underneath the earth, where that goes, that's bound to change things. Well, and also, a lot of times, they are releasing other things in the earth

that shouldn't really be in our drinking water. And that stuff does get into drinking water. The soil pollutes the heck out of it. Sometimes there's a fire, underground fires, that you can't even get to to put out. Like in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Isn't that crazy, a fire burning deep within the earth? Yeah.

That just sounds dangerous. Yeah, if a coal seam catches, you're in big trouble. Because that is not getting put out anytime soon. Maybe 150 years, it'll burn itself out. Who knows? Really? Yeah, that's what Centralia's got going on. A still?

Yeah. Wow. Still on fire. Like it will probably be on fire for a century. Man, I need to look into that. I haven't heard of that. Oh, it's neat. Really?

Yeah, they had banned in the town. They had to. Crazy. Yeah, there was a kid in the 80s after the fire had caught. It was a landfill or a tire fire, something stupid. And it caught a coal seam on fire, an underground coal seam. And they knew it was burning, but they didn't evacuate the town until a kid in 1982

was just playing in the street. And the street opened up and almost swallowed him into a pit of fire. They were like, we need to get out of here. Holy cow. So that area is just like a, I mean, is it fenced up? And it's a death zone? Yes.

But apparently, there's still a couple of people that live there that are like, I'm not moving. Really? Man. Never heard of that. There's also, have you heard of wildcat mining? I don't think so. It's basically.

Why don't I know anything about mining? It's basically. I asked the same question. Why do you know everything about mining? That's a good question, too. Wildcat mining I know about, because I couldn't find the name of the article. But there was a great article I think I read in Harper's a year

or two back. And it was about wildcat mining in Guyana. And basically, it's just illegal mining. But they are the most polluting mining operations you can imagine. Really? Like they use mercury, Quicksilver, to bind to gold. And they're handling the Quicksilver.

It's getting everywhere. They're leaving it behind. It's going in the soil. It's going in the water. And that's just like one problem with it. They do nothing to remediate. Like the diesel exhaust or anything like that. It's just a really big problem.

What country is this? Guyana, down in South America. Is it just completely unregulated? Or is it like a rogue operation? Well, by definition, it's a rogue operation. Wildcat is just an unlicensed mining operation. Man. And it's not just Guyana that has that problem.

It's around the world. There's wildcat mining. But they have a particularly bad problem with it. Man. And I bet they make $1 a day. Oh, yeah. Very sad. Well, we might as well talk about the human toll,

since that's where we are. Like I said before, major accidents are the one you're going to hear about. But as an example, in 2010, about 2,500 Chinese miners died, but none of them were big, big accidents. So you didn't really hear about a lot of that. I'm sure you didn't hear about it in China. I know.

I didn't hear about it. But yeah, in China, they were like. That's a big death toll, though. Miners' family received windfall. They didn't say why. They got paid out. Yeah. And you talked about, was it in 2010 with Chilean?

In West Virginia that same year, there was 29 people killed? 29 to 31 people at the upper big branch mine in West Virginia, Massi Energy's mine. New Zealand and other 29 people died that same year? Yeah, 29 to 31, again, of the people present. 29 to 31 died at Pike River Mine. Things are getting better, though. Like a lot of these accidents, well, like you said,

sometimes it's trimmers, like we said earlier. Sometimes there are explosions. These gases can ignite. There's underground gases. It's really just volatile down there. And in developed countries, though, there's not supposed to be explosions. Like the mining operations are supposed

to be sophisticated enough these days that there should not be explosions. I remember Massi Energy got in big trouble because they just were totally lax about safety precautions, that kind of stuff. And some miners blew up because of it. Man. And then, of course, the health risks that are long term.

We mentioned black lung, but it doesn't have to be just black lung. There are all sorts of things you can breathe in. Welding fumes, radon, mercury, all kinds of respiratory disease that can arise from being down there without even like a hanky over your mouth in some of these photos. It just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I would wear at least a dust mask. You would be down there, anyway. I could mine. I'd be like, they're Exulander's family. You'd be break room, Josh. Go wake up, Josh. Make him do it. But you did mention remediation a second ago.

And it's all gotten better, safer, and more strict, environmentally speaking. But there are different, depending on where you are, there are different remediation laws and rules from take care of it right now like you were never there, which, let's be honest, it's got to be impossible, right? To come back every year and check on it. If you want.

I remember in the abandoned mines episode, it's like there's a lot of really dangerous spots, especially out west that are just abandoned mines that people just walked away from. And if a company liquidates and you don't really know who the owners were, then there's not a lot you can do. True. Should we talk about the canary?

I think we should, man. You've heard the phrase canary in a coal mine, which I never really understood not where it came from, but I didn't even know what people meant by that until more recently. It's like the indicator that things are about to go south. Yeah, I get it now. But I would just hear it and go, I don't know what that means.

Well, there's actual legitimacy to it, right? Yeah, there was a guy named John Halldain who was quite the self-experimenter. He would try and kill himself, well, that's not true. He would try and bring himself near death by sitting in rooms full of gases so he could record results. Right.

Amazing. Yeah, my head is always off to scientists who can pick themselves. Yeah, I mean. Love those guys. No, really. He was also very sharp, right? From his studies, he found out that carbon monoxide poisoning stained tissues red with hemoglobin, right?

Yes. And so he's working in the 1890s here. He noticed that miners would come up with bright, flushed faces, mysteriously dead, and he figured out probably carbon monoxide poisoning. So he said, you know what you guys should do? You should start carrying canaries down there with you. Yeah, think of something really mean you could do

to an animal and carry it down there in a cage. And if the canary dies, then that means you have troubles. You should turn and rotten, yeah. Because apparently birds, the way they breathe, they're getting twice as much oxygen or just intake as a human. Both.

Okay. I guess. They're breathing in twice as much because of the way their little feathery little system works. Yeah, which is pretty, I didn't notice. This is from, I think, Gizmodo article, maybe from Esther Inglis Arkel. Yeah.

And she points out that a bird's respiratory system, when they suck in air, some of it goes to basically like their lungs and perfuses their blood with oxygen, right? But some of it also goes to the secondary sacs that just kind of hold it there. And then when the bird exhales, that air that never went to the lungs goes through the lungs.

So they're getting oxygen on the way in and the way out. But that also means that whatever they're sucking in when they take in that breath, they also get on the way in and the way out, which makes them very susceptible to dying from poison air. Yeah, but great if they're not in a mine and they wanna fly around.

Sure. Because they're super oxygenated. Right. But if you can get your hands on them and shove them in a cave and take them down to a mine with you, you can use them as an indicator. Yeah, and she pointed out,

even if they didn't breathe this way, just the fact that they're birds, theoretically you could probably take any animal, small animal down there. Oh yeah. And if it died before a human, then that's probably bad. But birds that were small,

put them in a cage easy, and then they had the whole double doubling down on breathing. What was that, wasn't that a KFC sandwich, the double down? It's probably. I think it was. You got anything else?

Nope. Well, if you wanna know more about underground mining, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listening in there. I'm gonna call this, I think this girl's trying to sue us.

Oh, good. It's actually not true. Hey guys, I'm new to the podcast thing, but discovered yours. And it is awesome, all caps. I was born and raised in Seattle in an intentional community, not religious or culty, just lots of hippies.

In the late 1990s, my housemates and I set out to free the Seattle airwaves via pirate radio. Long story short, we got up and running with a show called Eight Shall Not Kill Eight. Great title. Yeah. It was a mix of music, life, commentary, and HowStuffWorks.

I actually read from one of the coolest books I had, which was HowStuffWorks. I remember we had those books years ago. Yeah, by Marshall Brink. Yeah, and she would read these things. Like she kind of had the first version of our podcast. And she said, even though you guys have an amazingly sweet and popular podcast,

and I had a pirate radio show just reaching Capitol Hill in Seattle in the late 90s, I feel akin to you guys, fortunately for me. Unfortunately, after a few months, two guys wearing suits knocked on the door. They thought was our studio. We had a secret door and ladder, and club knocks. Oh, I guess like, yeah, secret knocks.

And obviously we had been found out, which is crazy because we barely had a mile radius of coverage, but the government is a government and we weren't paying them, so they got upset. Actually sent two dudes after her. I'm not. Is that crazy?

That's just terrible. We ended up getting shut down, and though I am very thankful for podcasts, I still feel like the people should own their airwaves. And I encourage everyone to start a pirate radio station of their own. Thanks for everything. Can't wait to hear about the feet washing

ashore in my state. Oh, yeah, great show. The mysterious feet. Yeah, I love that one. British Columbia, and I will write you again. So that is from Aaron. Thanks a lot, Aaron, power to the people. Yeah.

I thought for a minute when I was reading that, she was gonna say, this is my idea. Yeah. So get the checkbook out. Yeah. If you want to see us, please don't. Instead, you can just get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can hang out with us on Instagram at S-Y-S-K podcast as well. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.com at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.