Mountain Top Removal Lesson

Mountain Top Cake Removal

Objective: To understand the basic steps of mountaintop removal and their effect on the land.

Materials:

  • oven-safe glass mixing bowl
  • cake mix
  • knife
  • 3 to 4 cups chocolate icing
  • other colored icicing (preferably black)
  • 2 to 3 cups crushed chocolate cookies (we combined chocolate graham crackers, fudge cookies, and chocolate wafer cookies)
  • material to represent trees (plastic trees, toothpicks, etc.)
  • toothpicks
  • spoons
  • glue
  • paper

Optional:

  • sample of real coal
  • other decorations to put on cake (plastic bugs, blue icing for a river, white icing for snow, etc.)

Directions

Phase One: Bake a Dome Cake

1. Preheat your oven to 25 degrees F less than the temperature indicated on your specific cake batter recipe. Choose a glass, oven-safe mixing bowl. Pyrex glass works well for this.

2. Spray the surface of the bowl with cooking spray.

3. Pour the batter into the mixing bowl as if it were a baking pan.

4. Place the bowl in the oven. Five minutes after the amount of time specified in your cake batter recipe, test the center of the cake with a toothpick. When the toothpick comes out clean, the cake is done. The center will not likely be fully cooked at this point due to the shape of the bowl. Keep the oven on and check on the cake every five minutes until it is done.

5. While the cake is cooking explain what coal is, how it is formed, and what it is used for. Don’t go into how coal is extracted because you will have the kids explore that on their own later in the lesson.

6. Invert the bowl to remove the cake after baking.

Phase Two: Build a Mountain

1. Explain that coal is found in seams inside mountains. Cut the mountain about 1/4 down from the top straight across. Remove the top of the cake and set it to the side for later. Add a layer of the black icing to represent the coal seam. Put the top of the cake back on the “coal seam.”

2. Cover the mountain in the brown icing to represent the top soil of the mountain.

3. Add the “trees” to the top of the mountain and any other decorations you have.

Optional: You could now show images of mountains before and after the mountain top removal process

4. Ask “How do you think coal is extracted from the mountain?” Have kids brainstorm the different ways we could do this. Highlight how it is impossible to get the coal out without damaging the Earth. Then go on to say something like _"One way people extract coal is by doing something called mountain-top removal. How do you think mountain top removal works?"

5. Kids guess how mountaint-top removal works.

Phase Three: Simulating Mountain Top Removal

It’s probably worth having a pre-talk that while this next part is fun in a way (making a mess with cake, etc.) that we should always be thinking back to what this is representing- in real life this isn’t a cake that is being destroyed, but the mountains and the wildlife and communities they support. So, it’s definitely ok to have fun, but remember why we are doing this activity. Also, to listen carefully to the directions so things don’t get too crazy :)"

1. Clear Cut Forests: Use this explanation to discuss with the kids this part of the process.
Forests are clear-cut; often scraping away topsoil, lumber, understory herbs such as ginseng and goldenseal, and all other forms of life that do not move out of the way quickly enough. Wildlife habitat is destroyed and vegetation loss often leads to floods and landslides.
Then have the kids wipe off the trees and some of the frosting on the top of the mountain.

2. Blast Off Mountaintops:
Explosives up to 100 times as strong as ones that tore open the Oklahoma City Federal building blast up to 800 feet off mountaintops. Explosions can cause damage to home foundations and wells. “Fly rock,” more aptly named fly boulder, can rain off mountains, endangering resident’s lives and homes.
Take some of the top layer of the mountain off and crumble it up.

3.Dig into the Soil
_ Huge Shovels dig into the soil and trucks haul it away or push it into adjacent valleys. A dragline digs into the rock to expose the coal. These machines can weigh up to 8 million pounds with a base as big as a gymnasium and as tall as a 20-story building. These machines allow coal companies to hire fewer workers. A small crew can tear apart a mountain in less than a year, working night and day. Coal companies make big profits at the expense of us all._
Have kids take turns with spoons digging out the top layer of the mountain until they get to the “coal.”
Ask _"What do you think the coal companies do with all of the exploded rock?" Answer that they simply dump the exploded and dug up rock into a nearby valley.

4.Scoop Out the Coal
Giant machines then scoop out the layers of coal, dumping millions of tons of “overburden” – the former mountaintops – into the narrow adjacent valleys, thereby creating valley fills. Coal companies have forever buried over 1,200 miles of biologically crucial Appalachian headwaters streams.
Have students scoop out the “coal” with their spoons. Then have them eat it or place it in a pile for transport.

5.The Aftermath
Coal companies are supposed to reclaim land, but all too often mine sites are left stripped and bare. Even where attempts to replant vegetation have been made, the mountain is never again returned to its healthy state. Reclamation Problems.

The kids now look at what has happened to the mountain. Have them discuss what has changed about it. Guide the discussion
towards the way this affects the plants and animals that live there, the mountain itself, and the rivers nearby. Ask them what can be done about it (direct action to stop the mining, using less energy, alternative sources of energy, etc.)

Extensions