Nestled amongst the Oquirrh Mountains in Utah is the deepest open-pit copper mine on Earth. The Bingham Canyon mine, as soon as owned by the Guggenheims and now run by Rio Tinto, has been in operation since 1903. Even now about 275,000 tonnes of the purple steel are dug from it yearly, almost 1 / 4 of America’s annual manufacturing. Its rocks are despatched down a five-mile conveyor belt to be crushed. The mineral is then separated out, smelted into liquid and refined into 99.99% pure copper plates. The vertically built-in mine is the final of its variety in America, which till the Sixties was the world’s largest producer of copper.
