Willa Rubin
speaker
53 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Willa Rubin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's kind of like an intermediate between hard coal and petroleum coke.
Yeah, lignite. Then after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany reunified East and West in the early 90s, a lot of mines in the former East shut down, mostly for economic reasons or they ran out of coal. Then there was this pressing problem.
There were a bunch of holes in the ground that used to be mines, but now looked like a landscape of Swiss cheese, which is not awesome aesthetically or safety-wise. And so the city of Cottbus has a really interesting plan. And One sweltering day in September, I went to go see one of these pits, 20 minutes east of the city.
At the train station, I met up with Stefan Simonidis-Noak.
Stefan has lived in Cottbus for a long time. He works for the city council, and he's an urban planner working here.
Wait, did he just say lake? Uh-huh. Because, Emily, Stefan and his colleagues are turning this giant former mining pit into a huge lake. It'll be the biggest mining pit turned lake in... in all of Germany. It's even in the lake's name, Cottbusser Ostsee. In German, that literally means Cottbus East Lake, okay? But it's also a play on words that means Cottbus Baltic Sea.
And that is like the dream that Stefan and his colleagues are chasing. A mini Baltic Sea right near the city center. Yes.
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Willa Rubin. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
What does it look like? Emily, this lake is huge. That was my first impression. But honestly, what really took me aback were all the birds.
Another thing that I noticed is that the sides of the lake were all boarded up. The lake itself is not open to the public yet.
When it is done, this is going to be the largest human-made lake in Germany with a shoreline of 26 kilometers or about 16 miles all around where people can go and swim and be in nature. There's also a little tourism boost as well. And it takes lots of research to get that science right. And one scientist, who has done so much work on pit lakes in Eastern Germany, is Martin Schulze.
When you see lakes in your mind, do you see all of the different chemical calculations and so forth? Are you thinking about what's really happening beneath the surface?
Martin is a research professor at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research. He has written a lot about post-mining lakes in Eastern Germany and around the world.
He is super passionate about it, and he is one of the people who kind of wrote this playbook about how to turn a mining pit into a lake.
Okay, so first, when you stop mining, groundwater starts to creep back up to the surface. And what do you mean by groundwater? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when mines are operating, mines are kept super, super dry, and And all that groundwater, this is water that is normally below the surface of, in this case, lignite.
That groundwater is normally, when mines are operating, getting pumped out into local rivers. And it's being really closely monitored because, you know, no one wants mines to flood, especially when people are working in those mines. Absolutely not. Then when mining stops, that dewatering process also stops.
Basically, they switch off some pumps, and then groundwater starts coming back into these pits.
Like, kinda, sorta, not really. Oh. You start to get water filling up the pit, which is great, but a couple of problems. The first is that it can take many, many decades for all of the groundwater to come back on its own. That's problem number one. And problem number two is that the groundwater that is lying beneath the lignite, once it reaches the air, it is often incredibly acidic.
Because when that groundwater comes back up to the surface, it often comes into contact with oxidation products of pyrite. This is a shimmery, golden-looking mineral. Sometimes it's called fool's gold. And it can cause a lot of problems.
And that makes sulfuric acid.
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