Today, more than 100 million tons of black coal are extracted from the valley each year, primarily by open-pit mining, which uses chemical explosives to blast away soil, sediment and rock.
In the attack near this junction on Thursday night, not far from a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, a powerful bomb hidden in the sandy soil blasted through the floor of the Israeli tank, blowing off the turret and killing three of four soldiers inside.
From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for nuclear bombs.
Their ancestors as far as the seventh generation followed the same hard path: they hauled nets, quarried the earth, felled trees, plowed and grazed the ungrateful, winter-blasted soil.
Racing at 50 miles an hour, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930's blasted paint off buildings; soil crushed trees, dented cars and drifted into 50-foot dunes.
We dug, we removed rocks, we laid down concrete block pathways over those blasted rocks, we spread soil amendments, and we planted.
The moment it touched soil, the sky crane blasted out of harms way and crashed a safe distance away.
Soil and rock are blasted and scraped away by enormous machines, then dumped down the mountainside into adjacent valleys and the streams that run through them.
In its first major act of war against the British Army on English soil, the Official IRA yesterday blasted the headquarters of the Parachute Brigade at Aldershot, killing seven and injuring 15.
And it is NASA's dream that will land MAV on Mars and blast off with Martian soil back to Earth.
