Some of the most scenic mountain views in our nation are being transformed, with dire consequences for wildlife, freshwater, and humans. Lush forests are being razed, leaving behind what looks like desert mesas from the Southwest, separated by barren streams filled with broken rock. Welcome to mountaintop removal coal mining.
Mountaintop removal is a relatively new form of strip mining in the southern Appalachians. And it is environmentally devastating. To access coal seams, forests are clear cut and explosives are used to blast up to 800 feet off mountain tops, the equivalent of an 80 story building.
Heavy equipment is used to push mountain top soils and mining discard into nearby river valleys, burying hundreds of miles of ecologically-important headwater streams. To date, more than 500 mountains have been destroyed, burying 1200 miles of streams and forever altering the topography of the Appalachians.
Current regulations require that mining companies restore the landscape. But, due to compacted soils and fractured rock, blast sites seldom support reforestation. Their soils are especially low in nitrogen and phosphorus, nutrients that are essential for plant growth. And streams suffer too.
“The major elements of concern in Appalachian rivers are the trace metals that are coming out of coal itself, and the elements of most concern are selenium and manganese,” says Emily Bernhardt, an ecologist at Duke University. “And the only that we’ve been able to successfully remove those materials is through reverse osmosis, which is very expensive.”
In some areas of West Virginia, more than 25% of the land surface is under permit for current or future mountaintop removal. One doesn’t have to click down many levels on Google Earth to see the shocking rearrangement of the land—it looks like a moonscape.
Nationally, over half of our electricity comes from coal, which produces a lot of carbon dioxide when burned. Weaning off coal is an important part of any effort to combat global warming. And it will have the ancillary benefit of discouraging mountaintop removal.
Web Extra
Why has surface mining become a much larger part of the entire coal industry in the central Appalachian Mountains? Emily Bernhardt, an ecologist at Duke University, explains…
[audio:http://wamcradio.org/EarthWise/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Bernhardt-Extra.mp3|titles=Bernhardt Extra]Photo, taken on January 1, 2004 using a Kodak DX7630 Zoom, courtesy of Laura Heller via Flickr.