West Virginia Mountaintop Coal Removal Flyover 1 13Robert Johnson for Business Insider

There's no denying the importance of coal in America. The combustible black rock provides about 40% of the United States' electricity and plays a vital role in the economy of places like West Virginia.

But there's also no getting around major health and environmental concerns.

One increasingly popular mining method, mountaintop removal mining, could be the most destructive yet. While traditional coal mining extracts coal from underground, the mountaintop removal method blasts away chunks of mountains to get at the coal beneath. It also controversially requires fewer workers than other methods of mining coal.

On a recent trip to West Virginia to cover a chemical spill that shut down water for 300,000 people for a week, we rented a plane to take it all in.

Flying above ancient Appalachian mountains that looked from high like snow-dusted moguls, it was jarring to see large sections that had been leveled off flat. Mining operations have radically disrupted massive areas, in an incredibly diverse ecosystem, and there is significant doubt about whether they will truly recover. For all we saw, it was only a small part of 800 miles of mountaintop removal mining in the region.