Daily Climate: The broad high prairie of eastern Wyoming and southern Montana was once the bottom of a shallow sea, a rich subtropical swampland for millions of years. Layers of plants began forming peat beds 60 million years ago, later to be buried and compressed into bituminous coal strata.
Up to 100 coal trains are loaded daily in the Powder River Basin and leave day and night on railroad tracks bound for more than 200 power plants to the east, south and increasingly, west.
The Missouri River became the...