Greetings from – The Super Pit
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Adventures Hipstamatic
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Opportunistic Travel Photography and Occasional Geo-Tourism
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Wow! What an incredible landscape. It took me a few seconds to see the yellow truck on the right but it reveals the sheer scale of the place.
Thanks Meanderer… Those “little” yellow trucks are pretty monstrous in their own right.. They are something between 6-7m high!!
I loved all the “postcards” you sent while you were travelling in Australia, but this one is totally mind-blowing! Why is it that they chose to dig a huge pit instead of tunnels?
Thank Lisa, glad you liked them
Pits versus tunnels… the age-old question that’s for the mining engineers to work out!
Although geology defines the deposit’s shape and size, it is the cost of extracting the ore that dictates whether or not to open-cast it or to go underground. If the rock is really crumbly, you can’t build tunnels through it without an awful lot of expensive shoring up – it will be cheaper to scoop it up and truck it out… If the rock is too hard – you might find the cost of the explosives used to break the rock up makes the project too expensive.
That’s just a token explanation! There are any number of other factors to consider in designing mines…many of which I am ignorant of (and happily so!)
Well, that makes sense. Although digging such a huge pit mine can’t be that easy either?
No, nothing is that easy… So long as the price of whatever it is, is high enough to justify the cost of extraction – it’ll get mined. What with gold peaking at over $1900/oz the other week, pretty much anything could get mined!