Bingham Canyon Mine, Ut NASA Visible Earth
The Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the largest openpit mines in the world, measuring over 4 kilometers wide and 1,200 meters deep. Mining first began in Bingham Canyon in the late nineteenth century, when shafts were sunk to remove gold, silver, and lead deposits that played out by the early 1900s. It would take the advent of openpit mining in 1899 to turn the Bingham copper deposit into an