Scientists Have Now Quantified Mountaintop Removal Mining’s Destruction Of Appalachia
BY KATIE VALENTINE FEB 11, 2016 8:00
This week, researchers from Duke University published
a study on how mountaintop removal mining is drastically
changing the landscape in Appalachia, making some regions
40 percent flatter than they were before. The study, which
focused on southern West Virginia, found that since the
practice began in the 1970s, mountaintop removal mining
has lowered the median slope — or steepness — of affected
mountains by nearly 10 degrees. It’s also increased the
elevation of affected landscapes by 3 meters (about 10 feet),
due to valley fills — the practice of dumping the excess
rock, dirt, and other waste created by the mountain blasts
into valleys.
different parts of West Virginia have been affected by
the practice, is the first to look at the impacts on
mountaintop removal on a three-dimensional
scale; past studies had only examined the area of
land impacted by the practice. That research
“had really done a good job of mapping the
spacial extent of mining,” said Matthew Ross
, a PhD student at Duke University and lead
author of the study.
“But mining is not just an impact that happens
in space — it happens in depth. So we started to
look for ways to assess spacial footprint but
also topographic.”
CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF MATTHEW ROSS, DUKE UNIVERSITY
The impact of mountaintop removal is so
extreme, the study states, it shouldn’t be
compared to other two-dimensional disturbances
like deforestation. However destructive
deforestation is to an ecosystem, it doesn’t reach
the level of decimation of mountaintop removal.
“The physical effects of mountaintop mining
are much more similar to volcanic eruptions,
where the entire landscape is fractured,
deepened, and decoupled from prior
landscape evolution trajectories, effectively
resetting the clock on landscape and ecosystem
coevolution,” the report reads.
Mountaintop removal “completely resets the
geomorphology of the landscape, and how that
landscape will be shaped into future,” Ross said.
Mountains that have been blasted apart have
different erosion processes as they did before.
The process often creates flat plateaus that are
out of place among the rest of the Appalachian
peaks, and which aren’t hospitable for forest
regrowth — they often become grassy, instead
of reverting back to forested landscape.
The study estimates that, “in southern West
Virginia, more than 6.4 km3 of bedrock has
been broken apart and deposited into 1,544
headwater valley fills.” That volume of rock
would bury Manhattan, Ross said. Some of the
fills, Ross explained in a press release, “are
the size of an Olympic swimming pool, while
others are the size of 10,000 Olympic swimming pools.
“We’re only estimating the amount
[coal companies] dump into valleys,
but they also rebuild ridges with same rock,”
he added. “Those numbers sort of baffled me
when you put in context with natural processes
and also human earth-moving processes.”
The mining waste that’s dumped in the valleys
often contains selenium and heavy metals, which
the mining operation.Coal companies must get
permits for valley fills, but the method of disposing
waste does still happen in mountaintop removal
operations. The practice buries any waterways in
the valley, destroying aquatic life. As Chief U.S.
District Judge Charles H. Haden II wrote in a 1999
ruling on valley fills, “the normal flow and gradient
of the stream is now buried under millions of cubic
yards of excess spoil waste material, an extremely
adverse effect. If there are fish, they cannot migrate.
If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life
deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated. No effect on
related environmental values is more adverse than
obliteration.”
“A poorly-designed mining site can cause pollution
problems downstream for decades,” said Matt
Wasson, director of programs at Appalachian Voices.
There is some progress being made to protect
streams from the practice — the Interior
Department, for instance, is currently working
to finalize the Stream Protection Rule. The
rule seeks to update mining regulations
written in the 1980s, and will protect about
6,500 miles of streams across the United States.
It would require coal companies to more closely
monitor stream health, mandate that companies
restore streams and land affected by mining to
a condition near what they were before mining,
and would identify the riskiest mining practices
for drinking water and streams. The rule isn’t
perfect, however, and some groups say it doesn’t
go far enough to protect ecosystems from
mountaintop removal.
Ross and his team, meanwhile, are working
on a study that seeks to quantify how valle
y fills impact water quality in Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal has been declining in
Appalachian states — including West Virginia
, Kentucky, and Virginia — in recent years.
But much of this decline has to do with
competition from cheap natural gas, which is
contributing to an overall decline in
Appalachian’s coal industry. And coal
companies are still applying for new
mountaintop removal mining permits,
Wasson said.
“If natural gas prices stayed where they
are, then this wouldn’t be a big deal.
They’re not going to stay that low. If
those prices doubled a year from now,
we could see a lot more mountaintop
removal happening — that’s why they
want these permits,” Wasson said.
“Looking at the declining production
numbers for mountaintop removal coal
could easily lead you to a false sense of
security.”
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