Water itself isn’t the big problem. Water in huge amounts in an orderly manner is.
If you simply shut down the pumping stations that currently keep the pits dry by lowering the water table, the pits will fill up with groundwater on their own. However, there are two major drawbacks to this:
1. The pit walls will become unstable and start to slide… a process that could make it impossible to use the lake for a very long time.
2. The inflowing groundwater causes the pyrite found in coal seams to weather into sulfuric acid, which means that the pH of the lakes drops to levels that are hostile to life. This is precisely the problem currently being addressed through liming in the post-mining landscapes of the eastern German states, a process that also consumes a great deal of money and resources.
/edit: Melchior already wrote the same… should have read the comments before. ^^’
Water itself isn’t the big problem. Water in huge amounts in an orderly manner is.
If you simply shut down the pumping stations that currently keep the pits dry by lowering the water table, the pits will fill up with groundwater on their own. However, there are two major drawbacks to this:
1. The pit walls will become unstable and start to slide… a process that could make it impossible to use the lake for a very long time.
2. The inflowing groundwater causes the pyrite found in coal seams to weather into sulfuric acid, which means that the pH of the lakes drops to levels that are hostile to life. This is precisely the problem currently being addressed through liming in the post-mining landscapes of the eastern German states, a process that also consumes a great deal of money and resources.
/edit: Melchior already wrote the same… should have read the comments before. ^^’