stope

…of extracting ore are called stopes or rooms. There are two steps involved in stoping. The first is development—that is, preparing the ore blocks for mining—and the second is production, or stoping, itself. Ore development is generally much more expensive on a per-ton basis than stoping, so that every effort…

In this method, a number of parallel entries are driven into the coal seam. The entries are connected at intervals by wider entries, called rooms, that are cut through the seam at right angles to the entries. The resulting grid formation creates thick…