coal seam
7
4.9
- noun
- /koʊl siːm/
- Specialized
:
capa de carbón
- "They've got thousands and thousands of acres of a good coal seam."
- gas from coal seam
- methane from a coal seam
- fossil-rich coal seam
Examples
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The process itself takes place in a coal seam normally saturated with water at hydrostatic pressure.
Blog text (32) -
There's also the local effort needed to drill new wells when a coal seam is spent.
Blog text (32) -
Perhaps a more important tech problem: drilling through coal seams is actually fairly difficult.
Blog text (32) -
Then it moves through the mine, through cracks, and back out to the surface if the abandoned coal seam is above the valley floor.
Blog text (13) -
What's more, the new fields and coal seams were often smaller or of inferior quality fuels than the earlier ones.
Academic text (2012) -
Trying to drill down to deeper non-minable coal seams might be impractical.
Blog text (32) -
Extracting methane from a coal seam produced thousands of gallons of water, which the Environmental Protection Agency now classified as a nonrenewable resource.
Fiction book (2002) -
Geologists already know there are coal seams in the Transantarctic Mountains.
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Atop the sandstone is a coal seam, the relic of a swamp.
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The mine, tapping the 3.5-foot-thick Sewell coal seam, was once owned by Detroit industrialist Henry Ford.
Synonyms
12
6.3
A layer of coal or ore in the earth that can be mined
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a layer of coal beneath the earth' is directly derivable from the constituents: 'coal' (fossil fuel) + 'seam' (a stratum or layer). This literal noun–noun composition is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both words can readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Coal seam names a long, thin 'layer' of coal lying between other rocks deep underground, like a seam in cloth. So, a coal seam means the specific layer of coal that miners find and dig out.