A mountaintop removal mine site in eastern Kentucky. Throughout the Appalachian states of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia, over 500 mountains encompassing nearly a million acres have been blown up, destroying the hemisphere's oldest and most biologically dense and diverse forests and burying thousands of miles of streams. Proponents argue that in some areas of the mountains, this form of mining is the only way to access thin seams of coal that underground mining would not be able to get.