Surface mining, which is expected to increase in the coming decades, undisputedly changes the way land is used and covered with vegetation, but little research exists on how large-scale mountaintop mining disturbances affect the ways streams flow and storm water drains.
Nicolas Zegre, an assistant professor of hydrology in West Virginia University’s Division of Forestry and Natural Resources, has been awarded a seed grant from the National Science Foundation to study the scale and extent of the hydrological effects of mountaintop mining in the Appalachian region.
The objective of Zegre’s research will be to examine what happens to the flow of water in areas affected by mountaintop mining in order to better understand the factors behind flooding that is sometimes attributed to the mining practice. Zegre’s research will also increase the number of ways that hydrology can be examined in the target areas.
“Several studies have addressed the hydrologic impact of mountaintop mining with mixed results because they focused only on stream flow response or stream water quality of mined watersheds,” Zegre says. “This project will tackle the challenges of detecting change in hydrologic processes and demonstrate for the first time the value that what is called isotope hydrology can provide in quantifying process change.”
Isotope hydrology can provide information about the sources of runoff and rainfall-runoff relationships. Isotopes are atoms with the same number of protons and electrons but differing number of neutrons. For example, stable isotopes of water are hydrogen (2H deuterium) and oxygen (18O). Stable isotopes of water are naturally applied to a watershed by rain and snowmelt.
Because hydrogen and oxygen are the elemental basis for water, water isotopes are ideal tracers as they behave exactly as water would as it is transported through the watershed. Isotope hydrology is based on this premise of tracing water molecules through the water cycle. It can be used to calculate evaporation rates, separate storm hydrographs into time-source components, determining what quantities existed before and after the meteorological event, and geographic-source components, figuring the specific topography from which runoff came, and to estimate how long it takes water to move through the watershed.
Zegre’s research will help to fill critical research gaps in the understanding of the hydrologic impact of mountaintop mining and will provide necessary and more reliable data for formulating public policy initiatives that have local and national implications.
-WVU-
dw/10/14/10
Contact: Prof. Nicolas Zegre, MAWFTA & West Virginia University
304-293-0049; Nicolas.Zegre@mail.wvu.edu
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