Abstract
Mining activity introduces severe changes in landscapes and, subsequently, in land uses. One of the most singular changes is the existence of pit lakes, which occur in active and, more frequently, abandoned mines. Pit lakes are produced by water table interception when open-pit mines deepen. Their characteristics are highly variable, depending on the type of mine, the environment or the climate. In León province there is a long tradition of coal mining that dates back to the nineteenth century, and hundreds of open pits from the 1970s to 2018 have been opened, producing permanent landscape changes. This work analyses the main parameters, including morphological measurements, depth and pH values obtained from aerial photos and field work, of 76 coal pit lakes more than 30 m in length. The vast majority of these pit lakes were unknown until now and were not included in inventories or maps. The data obtained provide baseline knowledge that will allow, in the future, potential uses (storage of water for various uses, recreational use, wildlife habitat, and geological heritage sites) for these pit lakes and establish their importance as a new geoecological environment.
Highlights
One of the human activities that most transforms our environment is mining (Tandy 1975; Trigg and Dubourg 1993; Townsend et al 2009; Palmer et al 2010; Oyarzun et al 2011; Mossa and James 2013; Tsolaki-Fiaka et al 2018; Kopec et al 2020), especially if the mineral exploitation method is open-pit mining (Hüttl and Gerwin 2005; Sekhar and Mohan 2014)
76 mining pit lakes of more than 30 m from the major axis have been located in four mining zones of the León province: Fabero (28), Toreno (18), Villablino (17) and Valderrueda (13)
Regarding the shape of the pit lakes according to the development index (DL) index, the circular (39) and subcircular (30) shapes predominate, followed by the elongated subrectangular (7) shape, with none reaching the dendritic category
Summary
One of the human activities that most transforms our environment is mining (Tandy 1975; Trigg and Dubourg 1993; Townsend et al 2009; Palmer et al 2010; Oyarzun et al 2011; Mossa and James 2013; Tsolaki-Fiaka et al 2018; Kopec et al 2020), especially if the mineral exploitation method is open-pit mining (Hüttl and Gerwin 2005; Sekhar and Mohan 2014). Pit lakes (Castro and Moore 2000; Gammons et al 2009), called strip mine lakes (Hildmann and Wünsche 1996) and post-mining lakes (Hangen-Brodersen et al 2005; Baeten et al 2018), are one of the most unique elements that open-pit mining generates since they always involve a radical modification of the landscape with respect to the preoperational situation (Redondo Vega et al 2018) They are found at the bottom of abandoned open-air operations due to the inflow of waters of different origins, such as groundwater (Siegel 1997; Soni et al 2014), direct precipitation and surface runoff from the watershed to the lake, or both origins in conjunction (Zhao et al 2009). Their location characterizes these basins as endorheic unless they have an outflow channel (Redondo Vega 1988; Redondo-Vega et al 2017) to release excess water
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