Assessment of seismic events in German hard coal mining - occurrence and prediction

Underground coal mining can cause seismic events. There is currently no way to predict such phenomena reliably, in particular the stronger events. That is why, given the current state of the art, empirical methods are employed in this field. Some assessment criteria, which relate to the geological and mining situation and either stimulate or rather help to avoid seismic events, are presented in this paper. On a practical mining situation in Germany, these criteria are examined with a view to predicting possible seismic events.