The 9 Biggest Mines Ever Dug

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The Mir Mine, Eastern Siberia, near the town of Mirny in the Yakutia region of Russia.

[00:00:05]Soviet geologists discovered the diamond pipe in 1955 and the open pit mine was operating by 1970.

[00:00:11]For 44 years it produced more rough diamonds by weight than any other mine on Earth.

[00:00:16]The pit reaches 525 m deep and 1.2 km across.

[00:00:20]The road that spirals down the inside of the pit is 8 km long.

[00:00:24]A loaded haul truck takes 90 minutes to drive from the floor to the rim. The airspace directly above the mine is permanently closed to helicopters. The pit is so deep and so steeply sided that the column of air inside it behaves differently from the air outside.

[00:00:37]Descending currents form and any helicopter flying over the open mouth gets pulled downward. Open pit operations stopped in 2001 when the easy diamond bearing kimberlite was exhausted.

[00:00:47]The mine continued underground until 2000 when a flood killed eight workers and the entire operation was permanently shut down.

[00:00:54]The Mir Mine is the largest excavated hole in Russia, the second largest diamond mine ever operated, and the only mine with airspace closed for aerodynamic reasons.

[00:01:03]The Udachnaya pipe, 300 km north of the Mir Mine, also in Yakutia.

[00:01:08]Russian for lucky or fortunate, the diamond pipe was discovered in 1955 two weeks after the team's expedition was supposed to end.

[00:01:15]They found it by accident on the way home.

[00:01:17]The open pit mine reaches 630 m deep, making it the deepest open pit diamond mine in the world. The pit measures 1.5 km across at the top. Estimated reserves contain 225 million carats of diamonds, second only to Mir before Mir's exhaustion.

[00:01:32]Operating temperatures at the pit are brutal. Winters reach -60°C.

[00:01:37]Diesel haul trucks have to be left running for 9 months a year because if they shut off the fuel gels and the engines won't restart.

[00:01:44]The open pit phase ended in 2000. The mine continues underground at depths approaching 1,000 m.

[00:01:51]Russia's diamond conglomerate Alrosa runs the operation.

[00:01:54]The Udachnaya pipe is the deepest open pit diamond mine on Earth, operating in the coldest mining conditions in the world.

[00:02:01]The Diavik mine.

[00:02:03]Northwest Territories, Canada. An island in Lac de Gras, 200 km south of the Arctic Circle. The mine sits on permafrost, frozen ground that hasn't thawed in 10,000 years, and the only road in is an ice road that exists for 60 days per winter.

[00:02:17]To start the open pit, engineers built dikes around the diamond bearing kimberlite pipes that lay under the lake.

[00:02:23]Then they pumped out the lake water inside the dikes.

[00:02:26]The exposed dry pit was 200 m below the surrounding lake surface. A hole in the ground entirely below water level held back by concrete and rock.

[00:02:34]The mine opened in 2003 and produced 100 million carats of diamonds over 22 years before the open pit was exhausted in 2012.

[00:02:43]Underground operations continued until 2025 when the mine closed for good.

[00:02:48]Diavik produced some of the highest quality diamond rough in the world.

[00:02:51]Tiffany & Co. bought most of the gem-grade production directly from the mine.

[00:02:55]The Diavik mine is the only major diamond mine ever built by drying out a lake. A hole in the ground charted 200 m below the local water table.

[00:03:03]The Kalgoorlie Super Pit.

[00:03:05]Western Australia, near the gold rush town of Kalgoorlie.

[00:03:09]Originally a complex of underground gold mines dating to 1893, the operations were consolidated into one massive open pit in 1989 by combining the workings of 11 separate mines.

[00:03:19]The Super Pit is 3.8 km long, 1.5 km wide, and 600 m deep.

[00:03:25]It produces 800,000 oz of gold per year, about 25 tons, making it the largest gold producing mine in Australia and one of the top 10 in the world.

[00:03:34]The ore grade is low. Modern Super Pit ore averages 2 g of gold per ton, meaning a truckload of rock weighing 240 tons yields about 480 g of gold.

[00:03:44]The economic case depends entirely on bulk handling efficiency.

[00:03:48]The pit walls are stepped in 10-m benches with a 70° pit wall angle.

[00:03:52]A haul truck weighs 240 tons empty, holds 240 tons of ore, and burns 600 L of diesel per shift.

[00:04:00]The Kalgoorlie Super Pit is Australia's biggest gold mine and the largest single open-pit gold operation in the Southern Hemisphere.

[00:04:07]The Grasberg Mine.

[00:04:09]Papua, Indonesia.

[00:04:10]Sitting at 4,200 m above sea level in the highlands of the Sudirman Mountains, the highest altitude major mine on Earth, working in a glaciated environment where the equator meets permanent snow at the same latitude.

[00:04:22]The mine produces gold and copper from the same ore body, making it the largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine in the world.

[00:04:30]Discovered in 1936 by a Dutch geologist who flew over the area, the Grasberg ore body is a single intrusive complex that took 50 years to begin commercial production.

[00:04:39]The open pit measures 4 km across and reached 550 m deep before the mine shifted to block cave underground operations in 2019.

[00:04:48]The underground operations now run 4 km deeper in caves measured by the millions of cubic meters.

[00:04:54]Workers and equipment reach the mine by a 1.3 km aerial tramway that climbs 400 m of vertical rise.

[00:05:01]The road from the lowland port of Timika to the mine takes 6 hours and crosses 12 separate climate zones.

[00:05:06]The Grasberg mine is the only large mine on Earth working from a glacier to a tropical jungle within a single ore body.

[00:05:13]The Bingham Canyon Mine.

[00:05:15]15 km southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah.

[00:05:18]Mining for copper started in 1906 and has continued without interruption for 119 years, making it the longest continuously operating open-pit mine in the world.

[00:05:28]The pit is so large it is visible from low Earth orbit with the naked eye.

[00:05:32]The dimensions are difficult to comprehend at human scale.

[00:05:35]The pit is 4 km wide across the top, 1.2 km deep, and covers 77 square kilometers of surface.

[00:05:43]A football stadium dropped into the bottom would look like a postage stamp.

[00:05:47]20 billion tons of rock have been excavated since 19 6.

[00:05:53]That's enough material to build 10,000 Great Pyramids.

[00:05:56]The mine produces 280,000 tons of refined copper per year, plus gold, silver, and molybdenum as byproducts.

[00:06:04]The pit walls move.

[00:06:06]A massive landslide in 2000 and dropped 165 million tons of rock onto the pit floor in a single event.

[00:06:12]Operations resumed within months because the underlying ore body remained intact.

[00:06:17]The Bingham Canyon Mine is the largest man-made excavation in the history of the United States and the prototype for every open pit copper operation built since 1900s, the Chuquicamata Mine, Atacama Desert, northern Chile. A copper deposit so large that pre-Columbian indigenous peoples mined it by hand for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived.

[00:06:35]Industrial open pit operations began in 1910 and have continued for 115 years.

[00:06:40]The open pit measures 4.3 km long, 3 km wide, and 8 150 m deep.

[00:06:47]By surface area, Chuquicamata is the largest open pit mine on Earth.

[00:06:52]The displaced rock volume exceeds 6 cubic kilometers, twice the volume of the Bingham Canyon excavation.

[00:06:58]The mine operates in the driest non-polar place on the planet.

[00:07:02]Average rainfall in the Atacama is 1.5 mm per year.

[00:07:06]Mining trucks haul through a landscape that hasn't seen meaningful precipitation since the last ice age.

[00:07:12]The town of Chuquicamata, which housed the mine's workers, was demolished in 2008. The open pit had expanded so far that the town site was inside the planned mining envelope.

[00:07:22]Workers now live in Calama, 16 km away.

[00:07:25]The Chuquicamata Mine is the largest open pit mine on Earth by surface area, the deepest copper open pit in continuous operation, and a hole so large that mining swallowed an entire company town.

[00:07:36]The Escondida Mine, 200 km southeast of Chuquicamata, also in Chile's Atacama.

[00:07:42]Discovered in 1981, brought into production in 1991.

[00:07:47]Within 15 years, Escondida had become the single largest copper producing mine in the world.

[00:07:52]The mine produces 1.2 million tons of refined copper per year, about 5% of global production.

[00:07:58]To put that in scale, the world economy uses about 25 million tons of refined copper annually, and one open pit in northern Chile supplies 1/20 of it.

[00:08:08]Escondida is two adjacent open pits operated as a single complex.

[00:08:12]The larger pit measures 3.9 km long, 2.7 km wide, and 645 m deep.

[00:08:19]The smaller pit operates a separate ore zone 5 km north.

[00:08:23]The mine consumes more electricity than the entire Chilean city of Antofagasta.

[00:08:27]The water supply is desalinated seawater piped 180 km uphill from the Pacific Ocean. The Atacama has no surface water sources.

[00:08:36]The Escondida mine is the largest single producer of copper on Earth. The open pit that quietly determined whether the global copper price went up or down for the last 25 years.

[00:08:47]The Mponeng gold mine.

[00:08:49]Carletonville, South Africa, 75 km southwest of Johannesburg.

[00:08:53]The deepest mine on Earth.

[00:08:55]The deepest working face is 4.0 km below the surface, a vertical mile and a half below ground.

[00:09:02]The temperature at the working face reaches 60° C before refrigeration.

[00:09:06]Without the constant pumping of chilled air through the mine, no human could survive the heat. The shaft system runs in three stages. A primary shaft drops 2.4 km to a transfer level.

[00:09:16]A secondary shaft drops another 1.6 km from there.

[00:09:20]Miners travel a full hour from the surface to the working face on each shift.

[00:09:24]Rock pressure at that depth makes the ground itself the leading cause of death.

[00:09:28]The South African gold mining region has experienced more than 3,000 rock burst fatalities in the past century, and Mponeng accounts for a steady share of them.

[00:09:36]Pillars of rock the size of buses spontaneously explode under the load of the overlying mountain.

[00:09:41]The mine produces gold from a thin reef of conglomerate or that runs at a grade of 9 g per ton.

[00:09:46]To extract that gold, 6,000 workers descend daily through a shaft system that took 25 years to build.

[00:09:52]The mine has been operating since 1986 and has produced an estimated 800 tons of gold so far.