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The Bingham Canyon Mine is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. It is owned by Rio Tinto Group, an international mining and exploration company headquartered in the United Kingdom. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation which operates the mine, a concentrator plant, a smelter, and a refinery. The mine has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles (1.2 km) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covering 1,900 acres (7.7 kmē). According to Kennecott, it is the world's largest man-made excavation. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 under the name Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine. Source:
Wikipedia: The
Bingham Canyon Mine.
Facts.
Source:
Kennecott's Bingham Canyon Mine
Kennecott's Bingham Canyon Mine has produced more copper than any mine in history -- about 18.1 million tons.75 miles across at the top and 3/4 of a mile deep. You could stack two Sears Towers on top of each other and still not reach the top of the mine.
The mine is so big, it can be seen by the space shuttle astronauts as they pass over the United States.
By 2015, the mine will be at least 500 feet deeper than it is now.
If you stretched out all the roads in the open pit mine, you'd have 500 miles of roadway -- enough to reach from Salt Lake City to Denver.
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