Lecture 21 Summary and Notes

Some questions for the day...

1. How does coal rank vary from North to South in West Virginia. How does the geospatial variation in coal rank in WV demonstrate the expected progression of coal composition with increasing P and T?

2. What is science? What is the scientific method? What is the difference between peer-reviewed scientific literature and mainstream literature? What are the essential components of a scientific paper?

3. What are the top coal producing states in the USA? What is the general geographic distribution of states whose production is dominated by surface mining vs. states whose production is dominated by underground mining?

4. How has the productivity (measured in the mass of coal that an employee can produce in an hour) of coal mining changed over the past 50 years? How does productivity vary east vs. west of the Mississippi? How does productivity vary surface vs. underground? How would you describe the area (east vs west) and mining method (surface vs underground) that is most productive?

5. Increases in productivity means less employees are required... What % of West Virginians are currently employed by coal mining companies? How has this changed in the past 30 years

6. What is a watershed? At what level of anthropogenic disturbance will stream biodiversity and water quality suffer? Below valley fills in the central Appalachians, streams are characterized by geochemical characteristics? What is conductivity? How is conductivity used to estimate water quality? What is the effect of increasing conductivity (and increasing dissolved material) on stream biodiversity?

7. What are the effects of MTR/VF mining on the hydrologic characteristics of watershed? What are nested watersheds? How do flood crests differ in nested watersheds? How to flood crests differ in watersheds with large amounts of urbanization or changes in surface characteristics due to MTR/VF?

Slides from today are up on Sakai. Wednesday, we will continue our discussion of coal with a look at coal mining trends in Appalachia and beyhond. There is no new reading assignment for Wednesday.