Tectonic Plates, Coal, and Mining- Blog Post #1

In Biology lab on Thursday, we watched a video about how the Appalachian Mountain Range formed and how anthracite coal came to be as well as how mining operations are run in today's world. First, let me say that I had no idea how big the Appalachians actually are... I thought they stretched from maybe southern Pennsylvania, to north Georgia, but after watching that video I learned that these mountains stretch all the way to Newfoundland, Canada! According to the video we watched, the Appalachians formed from the crashing together of two continental Tectonic Plates, these plates were under what we now call North America and Africa, when these to plates converged the land was forced upward creating this mountain range. The video also provided an explanation for how coal was created, ancient trees were covered by loads of sediment and under incredible pressure over millions of years these trees became modern day coal. Thirdly, this video showed from a distance what a surface mine operation looks like as well as what a shaft mine looked like when they were the norm. Surface mines replaced shaft mines as the norm because surface mines are genuinely safer for workers as well as require less workers to manage. The video's main beef with surface mines was that the mines strip away trees and other vegetation in order to mine coal, even though the mining companies replace the vegetation whenever they move on from the area, it still takes the area several years to return to the form that it had before the mining began.