The Alabama graphite belt

The quiet woods of the southernmost Appalachians might fuel your future EV

Exposed rock near the future graphite mines in Coosa County, Alabama. Is this graphite? You’d have to ask a more qualified geologist than me.

A billion years ago, most of the land on this planet was mashed together into one massive island. One way to date the birth of Appalachia is the breakup of this island—Rodinia, geologists call it, from the Russian for “motherland”—roughly 700 million years ago. The incipient mountains were a new crack in the Earth’s crust.

This was a ragged edge, containing low troughs but also promontories. Alabama— today the southernmost edge of the Appalachian plateau, harldy known for rugged terrain—was one of these high points. Over hundreds of millions of years of drifting and crashing, of vulcanism and erosion, a chain of mountains as grand as the Alps arose, then weathered down to the wizened old humps we know today.

Those earl…