Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Harmful to Appalachia

A new research paper takes a large and encompassing view of mountaintop removal and its effects on the land, ecosystems, and the rest of the world.

The authors of the paper, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, Rider University, and West Virginia University, say that some past and current efforts, by focusing on water quality, both from a regulatory and legal framework, have lead to less research on mountaintop removal’s effects on forests and ecosystems. Titled The Overlooked Terrestrial Impacts of Mountaintop Mining, the paper has just been published in the journal BioScience.

Anyone who has spent much time in Appalachian knows that the mountains have always played a part in affecting the weather. Pocahontas County in West Virginia will get a lot more rain than areas east in Virginia, where the mountains aren’t as high. This new paper says that moving the mountains is affecting these weather patterns. “Topographic changes and land-cover changes associated with mountaintop mining have the potential to produce changes in climate at local to regional scales,” the paper says. “Modeling is needed to determine if the now extensive development of mountaintop mining is leading to such changes.” On a much larger scale, mature forests, which sequester carbon dioxide, are destroyed when mountains are flattened for coal. The reclaimed lands do not have the same capacity for sequestration. With more than 500 mountains succumbing to mountaintop removal, this disruption to the natural CO2 sequestration process of the Appalachian forests has implications for global warming.

            The authors also say that mountaintop removal causes damaging biographic fragmentation, affecting populations of raptors and songbirds. Back in 2006 scientists found that mountaintop mining was adversely affecting the cerulean warbler,[i] a wonderful songbird native to the Mid-Atlantic states that is “sharply declining in the heart of its range,” according to National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. A more recent scientific paper noted that mountaintop removal jeopardizes the survivability of Appalachian species as they shift their bioregions due to global warming.[ii] And another recent study found that the changes to habitat structure, water quality, stream chemistry, and the populations of macroinvertebrates in streams below the valleys filled with the overburden from mountaintop mines affected the abundance of salamanders in those streams.[iii]

            More and more the science shows that we are endangering and loosing great treasures, all so we can get cheap coal. Could we at least slow down long enough to ask if it is all worth it?

---

[i] Wood, Petra Bohall, Scott B. Bosworth, and Randy Dettmers. "Cerulean Warbler Abundance And Occurrence Relative To Large-Scale Edge And Habitat Characteristics." Condor 108.1 (2006): 154-165. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[ii] Beggs, Paul. "Horizontal Cliffs: Mountaintop Mining And Climate Change." Biodiversity & Conservation 21.14 (2012): 3731-3734. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[iii] Wood, Petra Bohall and Williams, Jennifer M. “Impact of Valley Fills on Streamside Salamanders in Southern West Virginia” Journal of Herpetology 47.1 March 2013 119-125