Princeton University - Council of Science & Technology

POPE PRIZE

Essay 1
A Sense of Time in the Fife Coalfields
Emily D. Johnson

Essay 2
Soapbox Derby for the Twenty-First Century
Adam Ruben

A Sense of Time in the Fife Coalfields

"I was always interested in being different. All my pals except two became accountants. The other one is an Egyptologist. Reads hieroglyphics."- Dr. John McManus on why he became a sedimentologist

Dr. John McManus and I set out on a (rare) sunny day in April to explore the remains of Fife mining. We drive about ten miles from St Andrews, Scotland, through farmfield after farmfield, through two small towns with a single main street and a pub density of gas stations on the American Rt. 1. First stop: Radernie mines closed in the 1950's. It is a piece of land. There is no mining equipment. There is no building of any kind. It has the square feet of, say an elementary school, and its hummocky, hilly expanse is covered with gorse, an ornery, acid loving plant. Our shoes sink into the mud.

On either side is a pasture, like any pasture in any Scottish tourist book, complete with complacent sheep. A pheasant flies by. The sheep graze. And graze.

Before mining began, Radernie was an undistinguished field, except, perhaps, for streaks of black after tilling and the tendency for water to pool after a sharp rain, as it is doing now. Sheep were pastured here, as crops didn't grow well due to the acid of unstruck coal. There were four parallel seams, about 40 inches each, interbedded with limestone. (One of the nearby fields is an iridescent green. There must be limestone underneath; its naturally fertilizing alkalinity a draw for plants.)

The large hump here is called a slagheap, or a bing, as in Crosby. It is made of coal trash-unsaleable ashy pieces that would spark and leave lots of ash when burned. When a road is built, which is happening more and more frequently in Fife's new commuter society, this coal trash is dug up, used to fill in dips, and then paved over. Coal land here is boggy because water can't move through the coal remnants, and bings, with their emissive gas, occasionally catch alight until the entire field burns, 50 years after the kindling was laid down. Bings are ubiquitous in Fife.

When coal is discovered, it is usually on a farmer's land. The farmer can choose to rent his land to a coal entrepreneur for a cut of the profits if he deems it worth his while. A typical seam of coal, 12 in. thick, 1 square mile contains 900,000 tons.

Dr. McManus takes a geologic map out of his trunk, drawn up in 1835 by a Mr. Landale shortly after mining operations here had begun, and revamped by the British Geological Society (BGS) in 1967 after mining ceased. It is yellowed, held together with Scotch tape and colored in with pencils. He spreads the map out on the back hood of the car. The Radernie coal seams are four dark V's. They are this shape because they were folded, probably more than once, out of the flat plane in which they were deposited. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half longwise. Now tilt it. A horizontal cross-section - a map view-is what I see on the geologic map. It is a syncline: the valley of a bend in the crust, a geological fold. The anticlines, or hills, have been eroded away along with their coal deposits so that by chance, we are left with these V's, the surficial signs of the Radernie seams dipping into the earth. If you look at a geological map of Fife, it is riddled with coal seams, each marked by a thick black line. The Fife map has lines that quickly disappear and those that go on for miles, V-shapes, straight bands, and squiggles. Some evaporate after their truncation, others pop up again a few miles away. Still more are the same seam under a different name.

Coal mining is over in Fife, and almost all coal fields now look like the Radernie. But for 500 years, since the invention of the chimney in the 1550's Fife was famous across western Europe for its coal production. Mines deepened and propagated, and estate owners began to take better notice of the black streaks that appeared during tilling. Their boggy lands, previously a cursable liability, now became an investment. Even as the population stayed fairly constant, annual coal output grew to 500,000 tons. Between 1910 and 1937, at the Scottish collieries' peak, Fife produced 6,000,000 tins of coal annually. From St Andrews, you can do a half hour drive or take a bus to any number of small towns that owe their existence to coal mining. Kirkcaldy (pronounced Kir-coddy) is one of the biggest to spring out of the coal seams, serving at various time the collieries of Lumphs, Benarty, Aitken, Blairenbathie, Dundonald, Randolph and Valleyfield and the seams of Blairhall Main, Sevenfoot, Lochgelly Splint, Five Foot, Dunfermline Splint, Wemyss Parrot, Earl David Parot, More Coal, Dysart Main, and Bowhouse. The Wemyss ( Weems) family, rich by birth, entrepreneurial by inclination, lived off of the coal seams on their hereditary lands for twenty six generations years, and built the towns of West Wemyss, East Wemyss and Wemyss. The names of Methil, Leven, Dysart, Dunfermline, all call to mind coal, coal mining, coal history, coal dependence, the coal seam, where people and geology interact. Like Hershey Pennsylvania, these towns were created by an industry, growing up rapidly and efficiently as the collieries opened and shifted across the landscape, exhausting one seam and beginning excavation on another. Thousands of workers passed from place to place and came to find work from Cardenden, England, west Scotland and Ireland. They needed homes. In 1904 a new car company called Mercedes wanted to manufacture cars in Methil, a town serving four large mines. The local mine owners said no, there was no room for extra business.

The last walk-in mine in Fife closed in 1989. It deposed 1500 people. Miner Alex Robertson left the mine tens years previously after the mine roof collapsed on his back, pining his legs and crushing the life out of his workmate. "You just take it in stride," he says of the accident. "It's your job. There are lots of other ways to die. You could work all day in the mine, go up and get hit by a bus."

"It is a fascinating thought to remember that when we burn coal we are warming ourselves with the sunshine of 250 million years ago." -National Coal Board publication, 1958

"The Carboniferous was a warm swamp with many newts." -a slightly outdated geology book in the Kirkcaldy library

"All things begin in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again."-Sir Thomas Brown

It was in the Carboniferous, the last period of the Palaeozoic, 360 to 286 million years ago, that the herbaceous precursor to Fife coal was laid down in layer upon layer, in a near-equatorial, Scottish swamp. There was more going on in Fife in the Carboniferous than coal production. Coal was a byproduct of an environment which left itself in the rock record in much thicker slices than a coal seam. Its 74 year duration resulted in some 3000 plus feet of rock. The top 900 feet or so, the youngest, is the Coal Measures, below is 900 ft of the Millstone Grit and below that, a whopping 2000 feet is the Carboniferous Limestone series. The even older Calciferous Sandstone is buried too deep to measure.

Pre-Carboniferous Scotland was arid, sandy, mountainous and erosive, leaving wedges of sandstone blown or washed in from the Highlands. Highland mountains tumbled from the northeast to the southwest and as the Rockies, Appalachians, and Himalayas do today, shedding pieces of themselves into the low-sitting Fife basins. There was no swampland.

The mark of the Carboniferous onset was a marine transgression, or invasion over the land. On the resulting Carboniferous shelf, stretching beyond Fife, beyond Scotland, from Northumberland to the Rhine and to Kansas, there were fossiliferous, deep-water oozes of lime, containing the shells of brachiopods, corals, goniatites, and all manner of ancient sea dwellers.

The Calciferous Sandstone is made of alternating thin bands of impure and dolomitic limestones, known as cement stones for their perfect ability to be burned for rough cement, and sandstones and shales. There are oil shales: fine mud and silt impregnated with the organic and carbonaceous detritus of a long-dead sea. There is chert: the result of slow percolation of radiolera, creatures a micrometer in size, onto the sea floor. These are all indicators: limestone (CACO3) is necessarily deep or shallow oceanic due to its fossil make up, the fine grained shale was laid down in shallow water, its grains having been eroded and broken down and rounded and made smaller by long transport through river valleys or oceans. Sandstone, however, is found almost everywhere, and without a closer look at its constituent quartz particles, tells you nothing. Overall, these deposits and their interbedding tell a story of a body of water that came and went over millions and millions of years.

A massive chunk of limestone marks the boundary of Carboniferous Limestone, which along with the Calciferous matches the U.S. Mississippian. The sea invasion at this time is quite aggressive in most of limestone-covered England-in Scotland something keeps flooding from being quite complete; the higher and hillier land perhaps. There are sharp cycles here of limestone, siltstone and shale, and thin coals, more regular than in the Calciferous, and more dominated by marine sediments.

We are especially concerned, however, with the last stage of the Carboniferous, the Coal Measures, appropriately named for their proliferation of productive coal seams. Coal though, make up only 2-5% of these strata in seams ranging from 18 inches to 6 feet. Coal is of interest to the geologists, who want to know what happened to and within the earth 300 million years ago. It is of interest to the biologists who want to know what was on the earth. To the miners whose livelihood does or did depend on it. To the entrepreneurs who run businesses. To the man next door who uses coal in his fireplace and to the factory who uses coal in its furnace.

It was in the Coal measures that the swamp forests thrived, due to a somehow elevated land surface. Perhaps the sea drew back, perhaps the land was pushed upwards by the assembling of Pangaea and the closing of the ancient Rheic sea. It was freak chance that made the Fife coalfields what they are and the fife coalers who they are; the water in Scotland was muddy and clogged with sediment and plant debris, when elsewhere in England, the water was clear and ripe for limestone production instead of coal. In Fife, however, contemporaneous lava outpourings isolated individual basins, keeping decomposing plant flesh in and inundating sediments out, in a perfect coal environment.

The uppermost and youngest Coal Measures contained fine grained, dark, marine mudstones like blue metal, bind, and shale. There is little or no limestone. Periodic flooding from inland brought coarser material into the Fife basin, creating sandstone deposits reminiscent of the earlier basin filling, and probably due to a sediment-driven delta mouth bar shifting seaward. The land began to build into the sea, bringing deltas, the towering seal trees, land for both plants and animals to inhabit.

The rock masses left behind cycles 10 to 100 feet in thickness of mudstone, then clay, and then sandstone as the deltaic sequence shoaled upwards, creating land where the sea once was, thicker sediments covering finer ones, marking infilling sediment or a receding sea. On top of the sands are fossilized roots of the swampy flora, the fossilized tree trunks and stumps, called cauldron bottoms, horse backs, baum pots, and pot holes, and finally coal where the water drained away enough to make peat.

In general, Fifeshire coal covers 170 square miles, 5-6 miles wide and 32 miles long, parallel with the River Forth and extending north from the Firth of Forth to the thrown up Ochil hills.

It was while these rocks were being laid down that the U.K was part of the shelf of North America, not connected land to land, but a sort of island colony of Canada, caught up in the shifting of supercontinents 400 times its size.

"Scottish coal is a mad kind of ripped-up mess" -St Andrews geology student Helen Davidson

The same is true for the deformation of the coal fields, which today slant at all angles, in a disjointed mess.

They got this way during the Permian and Triassic, in a time of post Pangea-closure that had riotous repercussions in Fife. An event called the Hercynian Orogeny folded and faulted Fife like the ridges in a mussed tablecloth leaving the coal seams broken, disjointed, chaotic, and irregular. The once continuous, horizontal sheets are now fractured at odd angles, snapped and bent into a myriad of discontinuous pieces. But, in another piece of geological good fortune, Pangaea's continued velocity as its constituent continents rammed together, is what made coal accessible in Fife. Like a tablecloth ripple, a fold has two parts: an anticline, or hump, and syncline, or valley. Over time the humps get eroded away and the synclines get preserved. It is in the synclines we find the coal seams, bent away into the earth.

In the last 20 years, coal mines have gone back into the landscape. But there are distinct physical remains and reminders. At Wemyss (pronounced Weems) you can look out over the ocean and see a color change in the blue hues about a half-mile out. It's a sharp salinity difference, where fresh water gets pumped out of the mine and into the salty sea. The mine was closed after a 1972 spontaneous combustion of coal fumes, but without pumping, the nearby land would flood.

That same spot is where trash rock that came out of the active mine was dumped straight onto the coast. It created a fragile equilibrium of sediment: erosion plus deposition makes stable beach. But in 1960, when the Weymss mine closed its doors, and sediment dumping stopped, 150 feet of beach got washed away. Front yards, playgrounds, soccer fields went seaward. A few years ago the local council put boulders all along the coast to protect houses from going the same way. The waters stopped 15 feet away from a row of front steps.

Down current, before mining, Weymss had a beach with shimmery, mica-rich silver sands. Beach-goers were bussed in by the hundred. With mining, the beach went black from the shale and carbon rich sandstone. Today it looks like any other Fife beach despite its name of Silver Sands. The Silver Sands beach cliff is collapsing. It has already sunk into itself 5 m. There is a hollow in it where 12 profitable seams of coal were removed, in a mine stretching four miles under the ocean an 2,000 feet into the ground. It now yields to its own weight, and will continue to slump until the space inside is closed.

At the neighbor town of Thornton, the railway station had to be rebuilt every five years due to the vertical cracks appearing in its stone walls. Eventually it was scrapped and rebuilt out of wood-a more forgiving material. The older buildings in the area do better as their lime mortar flexes with subsidence unlike the new brittle mud-cement. The old Thornton post office still stands, but barely, its windows fractured, its roof caved in, its name now spelling Pst Off. Road signs nearby read, "Beware, road subsiding," and indeed, the ride is a bit bumpy.

There are no more men underground in Fife. The mines have been closed: Dunfermline Splint, Bannockburn Steam, Manor Powis Main, Alloa Cherry, Coalsnughton Main, The Stink, the Crow, the Rough, the Ell, the Humph, the Baugh, the Drossm the Tourha, the Creepie, the Siller Willie, the Kailblades, the Corbie, the Stairhead, the Hauchlien. Unlike the millions of years it took for the Carboniferous swamplands to pass, for Pangea to form and dissolve, for the United Kingdom to shift across the globe, the Fife coal industry lasted a mere thousand. It took 20 years for the industry to go from booming to nonexistent. In ten years more perhaps even the names will be eroded away.