Science and Regulation:
Mountaintop Mining Consequences
M. A. Palmer,1,2,*
E. S. Bernhardt,3
W. H. Schlesinger,4
K. N. Eshleman,1
E. Foufoula-Georgiou,5
M. S. Hendryx,6
A. D. Lemly,7
G. E. Likens,4
O. L. Loucks,8
M. E. Power,9
P. S. White,10
P. R. Wilcock11
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.
1 University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Cambridge, MD 21613, USA.
2 University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
3 Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
4 Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY 12545, USA.
5 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA.
6 West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA.
7 Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA.
8 Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
9 University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
10 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
11 Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
* Author for correspondence. E-mail: mpalmer{at}umd.edu
