John Welsh Photography

Hour 61 of this render. Four brain cells left. We have been reading DOE research reports about mine drainage chemistry. Send help. Or coffee. Preferably both. ☕⛏️

Here's what happens when you archive demolished coal breakers for a living and have too much unsupervised time:

Federal researchers sampled 94 acid mine drainage treatment systems across Pennsylvania and found rare earth element concentrations of up to 2,000 mg/kg in the sludge. Pennsylvania has ~11,000 abandoned mines. ~500 of those AMD systems are accumulating REE-rich solids right now. Penn State has a working pilot facility extracting those minerals from PA mine drainage today.

These are real government-funded studies we can link you to. (Search OSTI.GOV: 2511302, 2570848, 3363370 — or see bio link.)

For context: neodymium, dysprosium, cerium — these are EV battery and wind turbine minerals. China controls most of the global supply. Pennsylvania has been treating a potential domestic source as a waste product for 60 years.

Meanwhile, data centers are moving in with the same promises the coal companies made in 1882. Draw the power. Export the value. Leave the land.

Disclaimer, very much warranted: the three DOE studies are linked and verified. Everything else we found somewhere around hour 47 of this render, when our judgment was clearly impaired. We believe it. We are also two filmmakers who have been awake too long watching a progress bar.

We're not scientists. We're not economists. We archive what got demolished and make films about what was lost.

But we're paying very close attention to what comes next.

Progress bar: 68%. ⛏️

minepools mininghistory Pennsylvania AMD abandonedmineland datacenters industrialheritage BeyondTheBreaker

So the question running through this whole project was a simple one. What's the point of preserving a space in 360° if nobody can actually step inside it?

Composing without a frame was the first shift. Stitching came next. The last step was making it experiential — an equirectangular file wrapped onto the inside of a sphere, rendered in a browser using Pannellum, an open-source WebGL viewer. No plugin, no install. Just a space you can navigate with a mouse.

The live embed is on the BlueCoal360 site now. The Huber's conveyor room. A building demolished in 2014. You can look up at the ceiling, down at the floor, across at machinery that no longer exists.

Final in a three-part series. Go try it.

bluecoal360.com/embedding-360-web-experience/