Assessment of the open-mining prevalence on the territory of Moscow region

Lands disturbed by open cuts and associated dumps often become unsuitable for further use as construction sites. Disturbed lands are technogenically altered soils with new changed physicomechanical and physicochemical properties. The paper examines the results of researching the disturbed lands of common mineral resources open cuts in Moscow region, provides a description of the causes and types of land disturbance, as well as examples of images of disturbed lands on satellite images. For this purposes, thematic and topographic maps and remote sensing materials - satellite images of the territory of the Moscow region were used. The problems of impact of common mineral resources extraction on the natural complexes in the region, the scale of technogenic transformation of the earth surface as a result of open cuts mining as well as the geoecological problems arising in this case are considered. Numerical geoecological assessment of sand quarries in Moscow region is also given.