NASA offers time-lapse view of mountaintop mine

If you use the aerial/satellite view in online mapping programs and know something about the landscape of Central Appalachia, it's not hard to pick out areas that are being mined and some that have been mined. But rarely do we get a time-lapse view of the expansion of a big operation, like the Hobet Mine in southern West Virginia, near Madison. The folks at NASA's Earth Observatory have done just that, with a series of images that begin and end with the pictures below. The first shows the mine in 1984, shortly after it opened; the next one shows it last year, with helpful notations of reclaimed and permitted areas.

Earth Observatory's Rebecca Lindsey wrote this description: "Below the densely forested slopes of southern West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains is a layer cake of thin coal seams. To uncover this coal profitably, mining companies engineer large—sometimes very large—surface mines. . . . In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency intervened in the approval of a permit to further expand the Hobet mine into the Berry Branch area (white outline) and worked with mine operators to minimize the disturbance and to reduce the number and size of valley fills." Go to this page to click through year-by-year images of the site and Lindsey's full article. Go here for a longer version of this item, on our Appalachian Coal page.