Mountaintop Mining Overview
Background, Regulations, and Current Controversies
The environmental, economic, and societal impacts of the surface mining practice termed mountaintop removal mining have attracted considerable attention. This type of surface mining occurs in an area of approximately 12 million acres located in portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. As its name suggests, mountaintop removal mining involves removing the top of a mountain in order to recover the coal seams contained in the mountain. Explosives are used to break the mountain’s rock, and massive earth-moving equipment, often including equipment called draglines, removes the spoil, i.e., the dirt and rock that composed the mountaintop over or between…
