Water Downstream from the Mines
Ambience: Stream
There’s an old saying that “everybody lives downstream”, and when you’re downstream from a coal mine, you want to know what the impacts may be from what’s happening upstream. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Schoenholtz: My research team works in headwater streams that are affected by mountaintop removal mining in the Central Appalachian coal mining area.
Stephen Schoenholtz is director of the Virginia Water Resources Research Center at Virginia Tech.
Schoenholtz: The most focused part of what we look at is the impacts downstream to the threatened and endangered species that live in the streams and rivers downstream from the coal mining. What happens when mountaintop removal mining occurs is the rock layers above the coal seams are removed through large-scale explosions. And when it gets exposed to rainfall it produces a whole bunch of different dissolved solids. And we notice that in the streams draining areas that have been exposed to mining activities,those levels of dissolved solids are much higher than in reference streams.
One way that Dr. Schoenholtz and his team check on the effects of those dissolved solids is to monitor the population of insects, particularly flies, downstream.
Schoenholtz: Certain species of those flies are very sensitive to changes in water quality, and what we see is as dissolved solids goes up the overall diversity and quality of the bug community tends to go down. The fish eat those bugs and if the bugs aren’t there, the fish can’t survive as well.If the bugs are in trouble, that means the rest of the food chain may also be impacted. Also if there are problems in the headwater stream, indicated by a problem with the bug community, odds are there may be impacts or impacts downstream, far from where the mining activity occurred.
I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.