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THE urge to explore strange new worlds leads some scientists deep into the
oceans or the weightlessness of space. Reinhard Hüttl’s final frontier was
easier to reach. He needed only to move east across Germany, from the Black
Forest town of Freiburg to the region known as Lausitz, near the Polish border.
Here Hüttl encountered a landscape as eerie and fascinating as another
planet’s: lakes as acid as vinegar but teeming with microorganisms, more than a
thousand square kilometres of sandy soil that threatens to collapse underfoot at
any moment, and rivers swollen with extraordinary quantities of water pumped
from deep underground.

This bizarre terrain is a legacy of decades of intensive coal mining. “We
have conditions here that are unique in the world,” says Hüttl, with a hint
of pride. He now occupies a newly established chair for Land Preservation and
Recultivation at the University of Cottbus, in the heart of the region.

For environmentalists, the coal mines are a disaster. But for Hüttl and
hundreds of researchers like him, they offer a remarkable research opportunity.
The German government is spending billions of marks to restore these areas to
productive uses, and has called on an army of geochemists, hydrologists and
microbiologists for advice on how to go about it. There are even those who see a
different sort of value in the region, and want to preserve it as a unique
natural habitat harbouring rare native species.

What makes Germany’s mining regions extraordinary, says Hüttl, is their
colossal scale. During the 1970s and 1980s, tiny East Germany was second only to
China in…