World’s biggest open-pit mines

© Raimond Spekking / CC-BY-SA-3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Whether it’s raising islands, splitting mountains or extracting resources; people are constantly changing the face of the planet.  And miners are no slouch win the area of landscaping.  Some excavations, in an effort to move ore to mills, are truly engineering marvels; the largest of which are visible from space.

Some of the most amazing examples of our ability to manipulate earth come in the form of open pit mines.  This form of extraction is used when resources are found near the surface and when the composition is too weak to support tunneling.  These mining efforts result in massive quarries that are expanded until resource exhaustion.

In their twilight years, open pit mines may be converted into landfills, become unintentional man-made lakes but all give a jaw-dropping visualization of our capability to manipulate the world we live in.

MINING.com has compiled some of the largest and most remarkable open pit mines in the world today.

If you can think of any that we’ve missed please let us know in the comments section.

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