Strip-mined land

Includes crop and pasture land and farmsteads, strip mines, permanent snow and ice, and land that does not fit iato any other land cover. 

The western phosphates are sedimentary deposits in adjoining areas of Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah derived from a former inland sea. They consist of layers of limestone, phosphate, and chert, now budded and faulted so they are rarely horizontal. The phosphate ore is strip-mined using large earth-moving equipment such as shovels, scrappers, dump tmcks, and bulldozers to mine the overburden and phosphate ore. Mining ratios of overburden to metric ton of recovered ore are from 1—3 m /1 (2—4 yd /short ton). The typical mining practice is to remove ore and overburden from a pit in discrete layers (Lifts) of 10—20 m in depth. Overburden from the pit is back-hauled to a previously mined pit. Extensive land reclamation practices are later carried out to return the mine areas to natural states. 

Strip mining is used in flat or gently rolling land, predominantly in the Midwest and West, where large, efficient equipment can be used. In this technique, the coal is exposed by... 

Coal is an important and plentiful fuel in the United States, currently furnishing about 20% of our energy. As the supply of petroleum dwindles, the share of the energy supply from coal is expected to increase to about 30%. However, coal is expensive and dangerous to mine underground, and the strip mining of fertile farmland in the Midwest or of scenic land in the West causes... 

Water pollution remains a serious problem in the United States and in other industrial countries. The photo shows land left over after strip mining in Belmont County, Ohio. The various water pools shown are contaminated with waste chemicals. The large pool to the right of center contains sulfuric acid. The smaller pools contain manganese and cadmium. Trace metals in contaminated water samples are often determined by a multielement technique such as inductively coupled plasma rnassj spectrometry or inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy. Botft these methods are discussed in this chapter. 

Disposal of the waste pulverized gangue may be to underground or strip mined areas. However, excess disposal volumes can be a problem. Dry land disposal followed by aesthetic contouring and reestablishment of plant life may be used. This method requires monitoring and control measures for any dissolved metals in leachate from the tailings. Drainage directly to a small lake or a water course is not permitted by pollution control agencies (e.g. [28]). 

Coal is our most plentiful fossil fuel. The most inexpensive way to obtain coal that is not deeply buried is by strip-mining, in which large areas of land are stripped bare of all vegetation. This causes environmental problems when the exposed soil washes away after the coal is removed. Laws in the United States now require that most stripped areas be restored. 

Watt s fiery two-year tenure consisted of a string of cuts in environmental funding, enforcement, and regulations, and corresponding policies to open up public forests and lands to oil and gas exploration, grazing, and development. In 1983, when he was criticized over a controversial decision to sell a billion tons of coal to be strip-mined from public lands, he attacked the composition of a federal coal ad-... 

Land that has recently been strip-mined for coal presents an ugly and desolate appearance. The overburden is commonly left in steep and jagged ridges that, when abandoned, are often slow to become covered with vegetation. Any cliffs and undisturbed rock upon which the coal was deposited may remain largely without vegetation for years unless some of the overburden is used to cover these areas. 

The after effects of strip-mine operations where no effort was made to restore the land and environment can be very depressing and discouraging. Drapkin s (1970) vivid description of such an area follows The streams around this crossroads hamlet (Lost Creek, W. Va.) run yellow-red with the acid drainage from mines. Huge bare strip-mine excavations slash across miles of once-green mountains. Vacant mine buildings rot and sag. Rusting,... 

Sandaraca, generally interpreted as the orange-red sulfide of arsenic, realgar, is mentioned by all the classical sources though none elaborate on its provenance much beyond that it came fiom mines . Vitruvius (first century bc) says that these mines were in Pontus (which, in ancient times, was the name of the north-eastern province of Asia Minor, a long and narrow strip of land on the southern coast of the Black Sea, Pontus Euxinus). and it is certainly plausible that the volcanic regions south of this area were a source of this mineral. 

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