Long-time followers know, I used to big a big fan of the weekly photo challenges run by the WordPress team each Friday. Unfortunately, the series stopped some time ago. Now, I stumbled upon a post telling me, 4 ladies also missed the challenges and created a follow-up. Round robin, they challenge their followers with a topic. This week Amy, one of the 4 ladies, demands us to show “layers”.
As a first time contributor to this challenge, I’m not perfectly sure, how it works. But, I try to find out.
My image is taken a few years ago at a huge environmental sin here in Germany: open brown coal mining pits.
You can see one kind of the huge machines used at an open brown coal mining pit for digging for brown coal. The machines in the image are so-called stacker. They are at the end of the digging process. The huge diggers standing on a layer and shave the soil with their rotating shovels from the side. The brown coal isn’t that deep in the ground. So, it’s possible to dig for the coal in an open pit instead of digging tunnels deep in the ground. But, it spreads to the sides and the hole in the ground becomes wider and wider. The brown coal isn’t as solid as the stone coal. It’s not pressed that much and contains more moisture. So, it’s much heavier. That’s the reason for not to transport it to the power plants. Instead, the power plants are right beside the pit. Flat conveyors bring the brown coal to the power plants and the useless soil to the stackers.
In the image, you can see 2 stackers in the foreground on 2 different layers and 2 more in the background.
Here you can see an overview image taken with a fisheye lens and some more background information. In this post, you can see some more images taken at daytime. It also contains some of the diggers.
Thanks to the many environmentalists, this will finally come to an end. Unfortunately, the damage will last a few additional years until these mines finally are closed and the renaturation process can be started.
Take care!
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