Abstract
Ecosystem issues have been severely concerned and studied when the coal resource is one of major energy generators, and green mining innovation techniques involving artificial-restorations have addressed and significantly lessened negative impacts on the ecological environment. The ecosystem of a coal-mined area, however, is able to naturally restore with the processes of natural succession, similar to the human body system that has the immune ability to self-heal a wound over time if the wound does not deeply hurt the health. Here we analyze multiple discipline real data from two mining sites, and evidently show an ability of nature that the coal mining related problems such as geological cracks, damaged aquifers and destroyed soils in Quaternary period can naturally recover around a half-year after the end of mining. Our results temporally and spatially demonstrate that the damaged ecosystem has a capability of unaided nature-remediation from the ground to the subsurface, which is very useful to the countries worldwide with abundant coal reserves and intense energy demands for their development.
Highlights
Comprehensive ecological nature-restoration investigations on the crack structures, the aquifers and the soil qualities over the coalbed mining areas are essential to assist a program to control any potential environmental problems including excessive artificial repairing[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
When the partial coalbed is mined in the WFs, the equilibrium states of the stress in the relevant rock mass are broken that the stresses have to redistribute achieving a new balance, in which the pressure bearing zone and the decompression zone are formed in the top and bottom of the slates[23]
Once the effect of deformation spreads to the ground surface, the cracks would be generated on the ground surface that include dynamic cracks opening temporarily and edge cracks remaining permanently open
Summary
Comprehensive ecological nature-restoration investigations on the crack structures, the aquifers and the soil qualities over the coalbed mining areas are essential to assist a program to control any potential environmental problems including excessive artificial repairing[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Two mining sites 25 km away in the SD coalfield, BuLianTa (BLT) and DaLiuTa (DLT), have been investigated for an issue of ecological environment relating to dynamic coalbed mining. This area contains a 3D seismic survey to determine seismic reflectivity for the earth’s crustal structure, an electrical resistivity (ER) survey to predict resistivity for the rate of water content and a ground penetrating radar survey (GPR) to probe dialectic for the subsurface characterizations. We newly used the time-lapse method to acquire and observe, process and interpret multiple discipline 3D geo-data at two sites of the coalbed mining areas to evaluate ecosystem changes. The time-lapse schedule matched the pre-mining, mining and post-mining stages, the multiple discipline 3D data focused on the shallow, middle and deep different depth. We temporally and spatially analyzed ecological parameters changes from the lithosphere, hydrosphere and pedosphere to innovatively illustrate that coalbed mined areas had the capability of an ecosystem nature-restoration
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