picture there all right so let's talk about um what are the types of Mining and what are they Mining and uh what are some impacts of that so first off when we think about mining we are typically mining some sort of a resource and usually a finite resource meaning that there is a limited quantity right so the law of conservation of matter all the matter that's on Earth is all that we ever be on earth and we are never going to get any more of that so they these mineral resources are finite meaning they're not going to get more once we run out of them and these resources are unevenly distributed on Earth so they they're where they are when Earth formed and then the and then plate tectonics have moved these mineral resources around some but they're not evenly distributed around the world and that uneven distribution of these resources can sometimes have environmental and social consequences so I have this image here of a young boy who is Mining and in Tanzania there's a lot of young kids who are um sorry Mr keer came in to the office and was yelling at his class in the other room so I apologize um so they are uneven and so in Tanzania where my husband's from there is a lot of child labor in the mines um they mine for a lot of gemstones um tanzanite comes from Tanzania they mine for some some diamonds but mostly like mostly like gemstones like tanzanite and rubies and emeralds and um okay so them being you know unevenly distributed around the world we if they're in places where child labor is legal and allowed um sometimes people use that and then that can have social consequences so um the what is an ore I kind of wanted to touch base on that before we move forward forward because when we talk about mining we're talking about mining for ore so ore is rock with the mineral that we're looking for in it so it's a concentration accumulated of minerals that are yielding economically valuable materials so you can see here this would be ore with gold in it so you can see the gold that is in that rock there's a rock which is kind of unwanted material and then there's the gold that's in it so when we talk about gold or it's just rock with gold in it when we talk about iron or it's rock with iron rock with copper and it Etc so it's just rock that has um whatever mineral we're looking for it needs to be in enough of a accumulation or enough of a concentration that it makes sense for us to mine that rock right so deposits are where we have um a lot of that ore found so we'll find deposits where we um when we go searching and prospecting for these minerals is where you see a lot of gold rock or gold ore rock with gold in it um and then reserves are the amount of that mineral that is still available in nature and still economically recoverable what I mean by that is it makes that it's not small part parts of it but you can go there and you can actually mine the ore and get a a qual quantity that is enough to actually make up for your mining expenses so again or rock that has some sort of mineral in it um and there's a lot of impurities in it because it's going to have you know sand soil Etc in there um and then there is the so the stuff U there's a usable mineral stuff and there's non-usable which is called gangu and goes into a waste pile so that's the stuff that you're just kind of throw out so those are also called tailings when we have them so Mining and or we get we get the useful stuff but then we also have these tailings smelters are the machines that we use to remove the ore from the non usable stuff right so to to separate them out and um these tend to be major polluters and use lots of energy in order to get the the the ACT not it's not really removing the ore the actual mineral from that ore all right so what types of mining are there the first one is surface mining and then the second one's going to be subsurface mining so surface mining is when we are digging for materials that are relatively close to the surface of the Earth and so we go from the top from the surface of the Earth to get to those materials and so there's a lot of different types of surface mining there's mountaintop removal you can see that here there's strip mining um there's open pit there's Placer mining those are all different types of surface mining subsurface mining is when we Dig Down Under the Ground so these would be ore or deposits of coal in here and so we would dig down to get to these deposits of coal so that would be sub surface mining so let's talk about each of these four surface mining techniques so mountaintop removal is going to use explosives to actually remove the top of the mountain as you can kind of see here so you Lo use these explosives you take off the top of the mountain and then um it exposes the mineral that we can then GA gather I think no okay so I'm sorry so let me show you this video I actually tested it to make sure that the sound actually did work and it does so I'm going to show you this video because this shows a really good image of mountain top removal I've been up there I've seen it Destro and one to move i s IND s har eny world stop that of that's happened 1977 and you are effective we are not only put lot of carbon in the atmosphere which is obviously changing our conditions but we also for s there's otheres all right so that's a image I wanted to show you that because I had the images of the actual M the the explosives and the removal of mountains and it talks about some of the impacts of it so we'll come back to that when I talk about the impacts of mining so then the next one is strip mining so this is strip mining here and strip mining has the most shallow impacts right so we we aren't digging really deep with strip mining um but we it has the biggest footprint one of the biggest footprints because it's it's miles and miles of um of surface that is removed of soil vegetation that's being removed and then we extract that mineral however strip mining is the best one in terms in in terms of being able to reclaim it we can reclaim strip mines a whole lot easier than we can Rea reclaim some of the other types of mining so that is we can actually return it back to a somewhat natural state after we do strip mining and then there's open pit mining which is when we dig these really big deep pits so we dig down down down down down and I am going to show you a video on that one as well this is the Betsy post pit one of 2 and those trucks are huge can't all right so you can see oh NOP don't don't play more sorry you can see that um they mine a lot of rock sometimes to get at a very small amount of the mineral that they're trying to get it so those are I wanted to show you that because you can kind of get the scale of the open pit mine and how really big it is so the basic steps for surface mining and this is really for strip mining probably more so than the other two um that we talked about so far is that the surface is going to be removed so you're going to remove all of the trees and kind of all of that organic layer grasses and bushes and all of that is going to be removed then you're going to get to the deposit and um you might have to dig down some to get to that deposit because it's not not necessarily in the very surface of the soil so you dig down to the deposit you remove that mineral deposit so you remove the ore and then you take all that unwanted stuff it's called tailings or also called spoils and you take all those the all the rock material that you didn't need that was not useful all the you know dead plants that you ripped out and You' throw all of that back into that hole that you created that you had had just ripped out and then you bring in some soil and you cover it up and you reclaim it and you need to reclaim it to make it look as close to the original condition as possible and so if there was a hill over here there still needs to be a hill over here um you know if there was a valley you need to make it into a valley again so it's kind of trying to do the Contour of the land as it used to be and then you have to replant it so um then you would replant with with trees and and bushes and things and then you have to maintain it which we'll talk about in a second but that is that is kind of the basic process one that we didn't talk about yet so I need to go back I just realized we didn't talk about was Placer mining Placer is what you think of when you think of like the Wild Wild West right so they went out and they and you and you get uh sediment in a Civ and the O in the rivers and streams and then you kind of shift through that sediment and what's left in your Civ is going to be gold or some sort of mineral that you're looking for and all the sediment will have passed through so that's Placer mining Placer mining can cause a lot of erosion because you're you're kind of digging up sediment along the banks of a river and a lot of sedimentation Downstream so you can kind of see there's a little bit of sediment in the water Downstream from that okay so um going back to where we were subsurface mining so subsurface mining is what you imagine with coal mines So You Dig Down Under the surface um usually it has to be pretty deep so you know resources that you can't get to from the surface so they're more than 100 meters below our surface you're going to use subsurface Mining and um then you are going to dig up down and then over to wherever that Reserve is so let me show you a quick bit about coal mining Oops why is it doesn't not play anymore any more I'm gonna be oh what is this this is not what I'm trying this is an ad that I cannot fast forward through okay let me put my face in the middle of it maybe that'll help make me really big hi don't watch the ad I wasn't meaning to give you an ad um the ad says we'll be over in 10 seconds so let's hope that it will and then we'll see that this works I hope um can't control what ads pop up which stinks okay let's make this nice and big where is the sound no so this one doesn't seem to have oh I have the sound here there glass Industries also consume large quantities of coal there we go as a fuel for heating and powering the facilities that's how coal used to be mine really you know by hand of underground mines drift mines end are constructed when the bed of coal is relatively close to the surface but is too deep to be in West Virginia travel s miles through the insides of a mountain 7 miles is kind of a lot so we now have these machines we're no longer using pickaxes mining today the machine called a continuous these powerful machines are remote control the machine has moving arms that scoop the coal directly onto a conveyor that leads to a shuttle car a miner then drives the shuttle all right so I like that one because it shows you um the inside of the mind and it also shows you how mining has changed um subsurface mining has changed over time so we still dig down and have to go over to find the reserve that we're looking for but now it's no longer individuals with pickaxes in there we now have those continuous miners to do a lot of that job for us all right so these are some pictures of some subsurface mines you just saw that video These are those continuous miners these are back in the day what it used to be so you can we we are extracting a lot more than we used to be able to extract so let's talk about some of the environmental damage so surface mining has a lot more environmental damage than subsurface mining does so this is an image of mountaintop removal and what happens with mountaintop removal we um know that there's coal in the mountain so we Blast Off The Top clear the top and we remove that coal seam but then we continue to dig down to get to more coal seams but what do we do with all the tailings that we don't need um unfortunately what we do is we put it either on the side of the mountain or in the valley we we kind of start filling up these valleys and so as we start to to blast off all of these mountaintop removal and fill in The Valleys we see a a mountain terrain flattened that's why that video that you watch about Appalachia was called leveling Appalachia because we are literally leveling it it's becoming a flat surface rather than a mountainous terrain so we cut we down we take it we put it into the into The Valleys with mountaintop removal so we have damaged habitats we have damaged streams and um so the stream that was here is now going to flood it's going to be have sedimentation it's not going to be the same habitat that it used to be it probably is going to become shallower which means that the temperature is going to increase um there's going to be a lot of with all surface mining there's going to be a lot of wind and water erosions carrying away a lot of the sand and soil that is there and any kind of toxic materials that are from the mine as well and those are going to get into water bodies and those are going to get into food webs and so um the landscape from surface mining is damaged the water surrounding surface mines tends to be compromised and um we even have air pollution from the the explosives putting particulate matter in the air from the trucks that are bringing everything away so surface mining has a lot of environmental damage and it has a really big footprint so if you can think of how um if you're if you're strip mining how you're you're taking huge strips of land and you're ripping it out of all vegetation that that would have a really big um environmental footprint now subsurface mining tend to has fewer impacts so subsurface mines um you dig one hole and you dig down so in terms of environmental damage it's very little but they do have what is called acid mine drainage so acid mine drainage is when you have water that's gotten into abandoned mines it tends to happen from abandoned mines and that water is mixing in um with some of the minerals that are that are in the um in the mine and it will leak out of the mine and that is and it's going to be super acidic this like very low PH so super acidic water that's going to be mixing then in stream water and getting into streams you can see both of these image are of acid M drainage and it's going to getting into streams it can lower the pH of streams which can kill a lot of aquatic organisms that are in that stream if it's too acidic you can um the pH that is lower is going to cause iron to precipitate out of the water and you get this this Rusty red um oxidized iron color that is coming from from that mine so subsurface mines tend to get acid mine drainage taking place they also tend to have more health problems for the people who are living or who are working in the mines because they have they go are down underground and they're breathing in possibly carbon monoxide and methane and particulate matter and breathing those in um can have damage to lungs as well as you know carbon monoxide can can prevent hemoglobin from delivering oxygen to your brain and it can kill you so as we said surface mining there's like a lot of dust there's contamination of water um there's a lot of soil that's been removed or eroded away the habitats have been destroyed and but there's very little human impact on humans um some dust maybe and subsurface mining there's not as much dust but there is the acid mine drainage um there's construction and then there's the occupational hazard of breathing in particulate matter underground and carbon monoxide underground so what do we do to regulate this um we regulate it through the surface mining control and Reclamation Act mining control and Reclamation Act um is going to require that any surface mines um have to be reclaimed at the end when when we finish mining we need to reclaim it and that there's as minimal land disturbance as necessary to recla to gather those materials so with that we have the steps for Reclamation is first we backfill so all that rock that we've excavated in the mining process is all return back to the area they recontour the landscape as we talked about earlier then you bring in Top Soil you bring in seeds and starter plants so seedlings and then you have to water it and maintain it you have to make sure that there is erosion control measure so if it rains or if there's wind that your top soil is not going to erode away and in the East where it is not as drought prone you the company the mining company is going to be requ to maintain it for 5 years whereas in the west where there's more droughts and more drought um prone areas we would have they would have to the mining company would have to maintain that for 10 years so that's the process of Mining and the impacts of mining the Reclamation process and what we're actually Mining and and the ways that we mine it so I hope that that was helpful and I will see you tomorrow for some cookie mining it'll be great all right take care bye