Using Google Earth to See Destruction

An anonymous reader writes "On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth."

actual link

[elliott666]

So, if you want to check it out, the link that should have been in the story is:

http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/ [ilovemountains.org]

The Google blog entry about this.

[iandog]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/birds-eye-v iew-of-mountaintop.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Mountains?

[syphax]

Have you ever been to West Virginia? It's called mountaintop removal [wikipedia.org].

Re:The real story

[bill_mcgonigle]

Was the coal burned in power plants to power Googles server farms?

hydro [bfccomputing.com]

Coal is not usually associated with mountains.

[falconwolf]

Coal is not usually associated with mountains.

Never heard of the Appalachia [wikipedia.org] and the Appalachian Mountain range then have you? Or Black Mesa [blackmesais.org]? Coal mining was extensive in both places and still is in Appalachia [coalcampusa.com].

Falcon

Re:Mountains?

[Dachannien]

Terraforming the area does mitigate the damage to the environment significantly, although some companies have replanted the area with grass instead of trees. There has been an effort to encourage replanting of trees, but it might also be interesting to see if switchgrass could be grown there.

The largest environmental concern, however, is the production of large amounts of slurry (a water suspension of coal, sulfur, and other minerals that is created as a byproduct of the mining and cleaning process) which ends up stored near the mining site behind large dams created during the excavation process. Long-term disposal of this slurry presents a huge environmental challenge.

However, much of the political opposition to mountaintop removal mining comes from labor union pressure, since it takes far less manpower to conduct a mountaintop removal operation than to run a conventional mine.

Re:Mountains?

[Reziac]

Not all mountains are of igneous origin. Some mountains are formed of heaved-up sedimentary rock. And there is a lot of coal in the deep seams of such mountains (Appalachians, Urals, no doubt others that don't come to mind offhand). Deep seams tend to be high-grade bituminous and anthracite (the result of putting sedimentary coal under pressure), which are more valuable because they burn hotter and cleaner.

Conversely, surface coal (the stuff you get from strip mines) tends to be low-grade bituminous, or worse, lignite (not-quite-coal-yet).

When I lived in Montana I heated my house with a coal stove (when it's -65F, wood just doesn't produce enough heat), and that's how I learned that coal from Montana was crap compared to coal from Wyoming, even tho the major strip mines were less than 200 miles apart. If I wanted decent coal, sometimes I had to drive down to Sheridan and pick it up off the side of the road (they'd let you do that outside the mines -- small chunks tend to fall off the trucks).

BTW when splitting coal for the stove, I often found fossilized "prints" from plants (leaves, tree rings, etc.)

Link to the tutorial

[helge]

For those who actually want to try out this, go to http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/ [ilovemountains.org]. It describes which layers to turn on in Google Earth to be able to see the Appalachian mountains removal.

Re:Greenpeace founder debunks environmental myths

[meringuoid]

Don't believe me, go and watch this BBC documentary titled "The Global Warming Swindle" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU [youtube.com]

You mean the Channel 4 programme - I hesitate to say 'documentary' as it made Michael Moore look professional and honest - which has since been denounced [mit.edu] by one of the scientists the makers tricked into appearing?

Re:yamato!

[e2d2]

I'm not sure if the latest version of Google Earth can display moving maps, I have yet to see that, but you can get .kmz files with overlays of weather data pretty easily for the US and EU. Just search for .kmz files using intellicast data for your local area or something similiar. There are so many there's no point in me posting a link, I have doppler from intellicast and IR cloud data coming in from NOAA in google earth myself, comes in handy. Being new to my area I find myself in google earth quite a lot.