geology.utah.gov calls it "the world's deepest pit."
The primary metal is copper, but it also produces gold, silver and molybdenum.
The Kennecott mine is currently owned by Rio Tinto, and it has a visitor center.
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| safe_image for Reflecting on the 'rich history' of copper mining in Bingham Canyon Copper is also going to be mined from underground in this area. In 1904 the first open pit copper mine in the world was started. "The National Register of Historic Places document about the mine filed in the 1980s noted that it had produced more than 24.6 billion pounds of copper just from 1904 to 1982." "Today, the mine is known as 'the world's biggest man made excavations and among the deepest open-pit copper mines,' according to Mining Technology. It produced 159,400 tons of copper last year, in addition to sizeable amounts of gold, silver and the chemical element molybdenum." |
The Kennecott mine is currently owned by Rio Tinto, and it has a visitor center.
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| RioTinto |
The visitor center may be a rather recent development.
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| utah "Join Rio Tinto Kennecott for the inaugural season of the new Visitor Experience at Bingham Canyon Mine" |
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| mining.com "Today what was a mountain 108 years ago is a pit more than than three-quarters of a mile deep (that’s more than 200 stories high) and more than two and three-quarter miles wide across the top. The elevation of the mine drops from 8,040 feet to 4,390 feet above sea level. If you stretched out all the roads in the open-pit mine — some 500 miles of roadway — you’d have enough distance to reach from Salt Lake City to Denver." |
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| mining.com Late evening on Apr 10, 2013 there was the "largest 'man-made' landslide ever recorded." Fortunately, that morning ground probes and radar monitoring equipment detected slope deformation increasing from 1mm a day to 5mm a day so all of the employees were evacuated from the bottom of the pit. |
There was another landslide on May 31, 2021. It was much smaller and once again geotechnical monitoring "identified the instability prior to the failure, allowing the operators to ensure that no-one was at risk." [LandslideBlog]
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| Fox13 |
I looked at Global Earth images, but I could not find the Apr 2013 landslide.
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