Avantika CHANDRA¹, Vipin KUMAR^1* & Manish Kumar JAIN^1
1 Department of Environmental Science & Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad – 826 004, Jharkhand, India, e-mail: vipinmicro1@gmail.com,
Contact: +91-326-2235643 (O), +91-947119352 (Mb), Fax: +91-3262296624
*Corresponding author

THE SEASONAL CHANGES IN SOIL PROPERTIES DUE TO COAL MINE IMPACTS

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Mining activities results in extensive soil damages, altering microbial communities and affecting vegetation leading to destruction of vast amounts of land. The entire mining process, starting from unloading the raw coal to the loading of processed coal, liberates particulate matter, which would ultimately settle on the soil at varying distances. This is likely to affect soil quality and possibly the health of the inhabitants. Soil samples were collected from the nearby areas of an opencast coal mine (OCM) located in Jharia coalfield of Dhanbad, India. The control site was an abandoned land approximately 18 km away from the sources of contamination. These samples were analyzed for physico-chemical and biological properties during three different seasons. The results showed that the soils of OCM impacted soil quality in terms of nutrient contents and microbial population, this is attributed to the mining activities in view of the absence of other sources of pollutants. However, the concentrations of other heavy metals were well below the threshold levels for human health risk assessment. There were slight variations observed in the concentration of heavy metals, assessed during different seasons in soil samples. Microbial population count was also observed very less than that of the native soil.