• DOI:10.1126/science.1180543
• Corpus ID: 206522928

Mountaintop Mining Consequences

@article{Palmer2010MountaintopMC,
  title={Mountaintop Mining Consequences},
  author={Margaret A Palmer and Emily S. Bernhardt and William H. Schlesinger and Keith N. Eshleman and Efi Foufoula‐Georgiou and Michael S Hendryx and A. Dennis Lemly and Gene E. Likens and Orie L. Loucks and Mary E. Power and Peter S. White and Peter R. Wilcock},
  journal={Science},
  year={2010},
  volume={327},
  pages={148 - 149}
}

• M. Palmer, E. Bernhardt, +9 authors P. Wilcock
• Published 8 January 2010
• Geology
• Science

Damage to ecosystems and threats to human health and the lack of effective mitigation require new approaches to mining regulation. There has been a global, 30-year increase in surface mining (1), which is now the dominant driver of land-use change in the central Appalachian ecoregion of the United States (2). One major form of such mining, mountaintop mining with valley fills (MTM/VF) (3), is widespread throughout eastern Kentucky, West Virginia (WV), and southwestern Virginia. Upper elevation forests are cleared and stripped of topsoil, and explosives are used to break up rocks to access buried coal (fig. S1). Excess rock (mine “spoil”) is pushed into adjacent valleys, where it buries existing streams.