Abstract
Question—“Is mine seismology quantitative or qualitative ?” The answer is straight forward as by its very nature the seismic source parameters are only estimates and in being objective they can be described as a conclusion of an educated guess. Once the main reason for mine seismology being qualitative is removed this may be a matter for future debates. Up to now, the dividing wall from it being considered qualitative is the measuring device the seismological software itself. With each software update, the resulting source parameters are different from the previous ones and the differences can be significant. It is as if with every new version of the software something fundamental is changed. As an example, take the definition of a metre. The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458th of a second. Now just imagine the resulting pandemonium if various industries or research institutions used whatever definition of a metre they wanted at any specific time. It is for this very reason that I did not agree to an update to the PMC’s seismic processing software and right up to the end of 2013 all recorded data was processed using one version of the software. As a result, the PMC seismic database was consistent and allowed for a very detailed analysis of the caving process as evidenced by the recorded seismicity. All analysis and interpretation of this nearly perfect database was based on trends and their changes with the process of caving. This is typical for qualitative analysis (Glazer 2016).
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Glazer, S.N. (2019). Introduction. In: Mine Seismology: Seismic Response to the Caving Process. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95573-5_1
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