Coal, Strip Mining, and its Environmental Effects Essay -- Essays Pape

Coal, Strip Mining, and its Environmental Effects Going to a school like Penn State entitles you to many advantages that smaller schools don’t have, such as diversity, world renowned professors, and several different majors to choose from. All of these things I knew before going to Penn State. However, one thing I was not aware of was the enormous amount of coal that the state of Pennsylvania has, and the power that its coal gives to the rest of the United States. Northeastern Pennsylvania, after all, has the only commercial deposits of anthracite coal, the premium coal for domestic use (Lecture 2/11/02). With all of coal found in Pennsylvania, there has to be ways to extract it from the hard ground in which it resides. The two ways we learned about in class were strip mining and underground mining (2/13/02). Strip mining is the coal mining procedure that I found most interesting. Strip mining, for example, has the highest productivity out of all the ways to mine coal; it extracts thirty to forty tons of coal per worker per day (2/13/02). Also,...