25. Black Land: The Mining Landscape of the Ostrava-Karviná Region

The Ostrava-Karviná Mining District is the most significant black coal mining area in the Czech Republic. The beginnings of coal extraction date back to the end of the eighteenth century while an intensive excavation took place here in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Black coal excavation is taking place in the Karviná part of the region to date. Underground black coal mining significantly affected the physical landscape in the whole region. Waste heaps, submerged ground subsidence areas and tailings ponds have become the main anthropogenic landforms. Different geological conditions in the Ostrava and Karviná parts of the area led to different manifestations of mining activity in the landscape. In the Ostrava part of the district, where the thickness of coal seams was less, more extensive mining-related surface change did not occur to such an extent as it happened in the Karviná area. The Ostrava area can be described as a landscape affected by mining and industry but with maintained residential purpose. In the mining landscape of the Karviná area, original housing estates disappeared in many places to be replaced with mostly semi-natural areas of trees, scrub and/or herbaceous vegetation associations.