How was Appalachian Coal Formed?
You would be hard pressed to find the plants that formed the coal in the Appalachian Mountains today. This is because when the peat was formed the land was actually almost on the equator, and the area was a huge swampland with massive trees that died and fell into the swamp. After this happened some 330 million years ago, the tectonic plate that this swamp was on moved north to where it is now. Then, suddenly, around 275 million years ago as the plate was settling in, another plate, as well as part of what it now Africa slammed into the North American continent causing a huge amount of contential uplift, forming the mountains that we now enjoy today. It was in 1707 that it coal was discovered in West Virginia (although it had been in use before that), and the first commercial mining operation started in 1748. It has been extracted in many different ways, although the most common are strip mines, or in the case of deep coal, more conventional methods like slope mining (fig. 5). Now we u
