James Bruggers

Louisville Courier Journal

Advocates of mountaintop removal mining would often advocate for the destructive practice by saying their corner of the planet deserved buildable flat land just like downtown Lexington or Louisville, for example.

A study out of Duke University made public this month shows that's just what's happened in parts of Central Appalachia, where researchers have calculated areas that became 40 percent flatter after mining.

Whether all that new flat land has turned into shopping malls, airports and industrial parks is another question.

Last summer, Watchdog Earth reported that coal production from mountaintop removal mining had fallen 62 percent since 2008, dropping at a faster rate than overall coal production during a period of industry decline. The mining practice involves blasting the tops and sides of mountains to get at underground coal seams.

This study compared pre- and post-mining topographic data in southern West Virginia, examining the regional impact of mountaintop mines on landscape topography and how those changes might influence water quality.

“There hasn’t been a large-scale assessment of just the simple full topographic impact of mountaintop mining, which occupies more than 10 percent of the land in the region we studied,” said Matthew Ross, an ecology Ph.D. student and lead author on the study, in a press release.

The team comparing digitized topographic maps from West Virginia before mountaintop mining became extensive with elevation data collected by aircraft in 2010. They found mines and valley fills from 10 to 200 meters deep. Across the region, the average slope of the land dropped by more than 10 degrees post-mining.

It would be interesting to know whether changes in Eastern Kentucky's topography would reflect similar numbers.

Ross said in the press release the changes researchers documented could cause water quality impacts for thousands of years.

“You go from having shallow soil that is between half a meter and two meters deep, to something that is like a soil that is a hundred meters deep. The way the water moves through those two different landscapes is really different,” Ross said. “There are valley fills that are the size of an Olympic swimming pool and then there are valley fills that are 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, so there is a huge range in the capacity they have to hold water.

“Once you have these flat plateaus, it sets up a whole new erosion machine and a whole new way that the landscape will be shaped into the future.”

The study is published online in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Reporter James Bruggers writes this Watchdog Earth blog. Reach him at (502) 582-4645 and at jbruggers@courier-journal.com.

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