Sverdlovskaya Region, Russia: a Field Survey in Autumn. Part 2: Scars on the Earth

Ok, it's time to finish the story about land monitoring in Sverdlovskaya region. In this post I would like to demonstrate some of the most unpleasant types of the land use.

Lets begin with illegal dumping. This dump (note that there is the smoke from waste burning down) is located right next to the potato field (mmm... seems these  potato are tasty). The ground was intentionally excavated here for dumping waste. Obviously this dump is exploited by the agricultural firm - owner of this land, but who cares...

Panorama of freshly burnt illegal dump

The next stop is peat cutting. A huge biotops are destroyed for no good reason (I can't agree that use of peat as an energy source is a good one). At the picture below you can see a peat cutting with the area of 1402 ha. There are dozen of them in the study area...

Peat Cutting (RapidEye, natural colours)

But the most ugly scars on the Earth surface are left from mining works. There is Asbestos town in Sverdlovskaya region. It was names after asbestos that is mined  there. The quarry has an area of 1470 ha and its depth is over 400 meters. Its slag-heaps covers another 2500 ha... The irony is that this quarry gives a job for this town and killing it. You see, if you wand to dig dipper you have to make quarry wider accordingly. Current depth is 450 m and in projects it is over 900 m, but the quarry is already next to the living buildings. So quarry is going to consume the town... By the way, the local cemetery was already consumed. Guess what happened to human remains? Well, it is Russia, so they were dumped into the nearest slug-heap.

Here is the panorama of the quarry. You may try to locate BelAZ trucks down there ;-)

Asbestos quarry

Here is the part of the biggest slag-heap:

A slag-heap

That's how it looks from space:

Asbestos town area (imagery - RapidEye, NIR-G-B pseudo-colour composition)

And in the end I will show you the very basic schema of disturbed land in the study area (no settlements or roads included). Terrifying isn't it? 

Basic schema of disturbed land