History of Mining – ASMR Story for Sleep

This ASMR story is an exploration of the history of mining, from prehistory to our times. I tell you about the first extraction sites for stones or pigments in the paleolithic, how mining developped during the Bronze and Iron Ages, through medieval times, and finally how it entered modernity. Mining continues to be vital to modern economies, and also transformed industrialized societies since the Industrial Revolution, as miners developped a new identity and fought for more rights in social conflicts that oftened spilled over to the rest of society.

Credits: Script and narration by the French Whisperer, visuals by the French Whisperer, under Wikipedia Commons, or under license from Panthermedia, Canstock, Shutterstock and Freepik. Sound effects and music from the YouTube Audio Library for Creators.

Links to Lights Out Library: my stories retold in American English by Olimpia.
– YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNa6KSDhYttemECVadSzcAg
– Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2KZFL3Lzi64OC0SjZeNoyo
– Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lights-out-library-sleep-documentaries/id1715193758
– Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17b0b79f-a273-4c1c-b8ca-86a7c76d5738/lights-out-library-sleep-documentaries

Links para la Biblioteca de los Sueños: mis historias contadas por Olimpia en español con acento mexicano:
– YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwT6QOKdD9Ui2Lc6NfttWg
– Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1t522alsv5RxFsAf9AmYfg
– Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/la-biblioteca-de-los-sue%C3%B1os-documentarios-para-dormir/id1715193755
– Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/51d159da-b33a-4add-b4b8-1dfb37f5b139/la-biblioteca-de-los-sue%C3%B1os-documentarios-para-dormir

****************************************************
Free trial link to the Slumber App: https://slumber.fm/fw
Slumber is a sleep and relaxation app that offers stories to fall asleep to from a variety of narrators, with sounds effects you can customize in the background, as well as meditations and ambient soundtracks. This link gives you 30 days of free trial instead of the usual 7 days. If you have trouble using the link, you need to install the app first, close it, then click on the link. I have an affiliate agreement with Slumber and this is a paid promotion in case you become a paying user after the trial.

Free trial link to the Aura App: https://aurahealth.io/guestpass/the-french-whisperer
Aura is an app for meditation, coaching and sleep, which offers a customized experience to help you improve on your priorities (anxiety relief, better sleep…). I am a contributor to it with sleep stories. This link gives you 30 days of free trial instead of the usual 7 days. I have an affiliate agreement with Aura and this is a paid promotion in case you become a paying user after the trial.

Music streaming platforms: look up on your favourite site, I am probably on it and the library of available stories is growing every week!

My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thefrenchwhispererASMR/

Patreon: your contribution is very welcome. I use it to buy props for videos, books, and pay the bills! Patrons can also download videos in HD, or audio only, access special surveys and listen to my stories as podcasts. https://www.patreon.com/thefrenchwhisperer

Paypal account: on the front page of my channel or https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FMRVE8YRLTTY6
****************************************************

Timestamps:
0:00 History of Mining
3:49 Prehistory
11:29 Bronze Age
16:48 Fire-Setting, Hushing and Roman Mining
26:03 Middle Ages and Thirst for Iron
35:44 Mechanization and Civilization of Coal
45:04 Social World of Miners
53:48 Modern Mining

hello everyone tonight we’re going to delve into the history of a major human activity since prehistory one that is still vital to Modern economies and the way we live mining mining that is to say the extraction of useful materials from the Earth surface typically mining makes us think of solid materials like Metals for industry or precious metals or coal and we will go through the history of all this but technically in a slightly broader sense mining also includes resources like different types of stone sand clay salt and liquid resources too like oil or natural gas or even water so we have a lot of things to explore and this is not just going to be about the technical aspect of mining this activity or also shaped parts of society especially since the Industrial Revolution it is part of the history of many communities towns and families so this is going to be a long Discovery journey and I invite you to make yourself [Music] comfortable as usual I remind you that you can always come back back later if you fall asleep this track is not going anywhere and you have time stamps to help you resume the episode where you left it please also consider supporting this channel on patreon more than a thousand people do it and they make this channel go on patreon is a crowdfunding site and you can support this channel paying what you want each month starting from $11 or 1o there’s no commitment you can stop whenever you want but as long as you support the channel you get access to different perks such as downloads Advanced releases you can stream the audios and videos directly on patreon without ads you get access to a private RSS feed that allows you to listen to All stories as podcast episodes with or without background sound effects on Spotify or apple podcasts and other apps apart from YouTube or patreon if you don’t care for videos and just want the audio you can listen on Spotify Apple music or Amazon music there are links to them in the description and the pinned comment under the video and now let’s get started with the history of mining one could imagine that mining began with Metallurgy when metallic holes began to be exploited to make a objects but no it is way older than that before the first metals were worked metals like copper tin or gold there were thousands of years of extraction of stones not any Stones stones to make tools and also of Clays to make buttery preh historic men did not pick rocks randomly to make their tools or their weapons they looked for specific materials especially Flint that was hard and at the same time breakable in fragments with sharp edges so that they could serve as blades or arroe heads some of the first mines we know of are often sides for the extraction of stone especially of flint and these sites are also sometimes called quaries what is the difference between a mind and a quarry it’s a bit unprecise and sometimes the terms can be interchangeable both are extraction sides but quaries are more often than not surface operations whereas mine would be Underground not always though this is no absolute rule some minds are up cast and there are underground quaries too another criteria is that quaries generally serve for stones of different types whereas Minds would be for the rest Metals gems salt coal but sometimes typ of stones when they are more precious will be extracted from mines for example the site for the extraction of marble will be called a quarry but if it is a slightly more precious mineral like Labis Lai or malachite it becomes a mine another criteria is the size of what is extracted typically in a quarry materials are extracted in Big Blocks or ready to use but here again that’s not very precise so as you see the terminology is more about conventions than a precise definition precise rule but we’re going to focus on Minds tonight rather than qu Aries in any case when it came to the extraction of Flint prehistoric men had both surface and underground extraction sites and as you may know these prehistoric sites are an important part of what archaeologists have to study to learn things about these ancient societies flint quaries and mindes tell us about how blocks were extracted and how smaller tools like arroe heads or knife blades or axes could be progressively shaped by a series of hits at the beginning of prehistory just a few hits that sometimes could look a bit random up to hundreds of Heats more and more precise and intentional by the end of it the sophistication of these stone tools is the main factor that determined the various periods of prehistory from the Paleolithic that was the least complex at the beginning to the Mesolithic the intermediate period and finally the Neolithic that so an explosion of the Precision and variety of stone tools making them more and more efficient thanks to better techniques and craftsmanship a lot of these Stones were collected near rivers at the surface but occasionally there are examples of sites where seams of the stone were followed underground by prehistoric men they dug shafts and galleries to access better Stones underground there are sites like these all around the world a lot of them have been studied in Europe for example in the north of England or in Poland where they were generally dated to the last period of the Neolithic 4,000 to 3,000 BC that is to say 5,000 to 6,000 years ago to put this on a timeline it was just before the beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe also a bit before the construction of Megalis sites like Stone Henge and it suggests that progress in mining already came hand in hand with technical progress in general and the establishment of sedentary societies as we advance in this history we will see that this continued well after but prehistoric or Stone Age mining was not limited to Stones another type of resource that was collected was pigments for the painting of objects of walls or for body painting some of these pigments were plant-based but others were mineral and were mind in particular the red pigment called Ur which was made with iron oxides that’s why it is reddish the color of rust and different types of ion oxides were Min around the world the oldest known mine in the entire world is actually one in which hematite and ion oxide was extracted it is located in Africa the mine of guenia in sand in the south of Africa the dating of this site with radiocarbon indicates that hematite was mined there 43,000 years ago during the Paleolithic the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age with the beginning of metalogy that would allow to start making metal tools this happened at different moments around the world but about 5,000 years ago around 3,000 BC this transition was already well advanced in different regions of the world in Asia in the Middle East and North Africa in Europe and in America not just in these particular regions that are traditionally called Cradles of civilizations like the Indus Valley Mesopotamia or mesoamerica it was broader than that metalogy appeared in many different sides for example Native Americans in North America mind copper near Lake Superior from at least 3,000 BC or in subsaharian Africa gold mining began 4,000 to 5,000 years ago this Bronze Age you know that bronze is not a metal by itself it’s an alloy that always contains copper copper that is often mixed with either tin or zinc but the composition of bronze obviously changed from one region to the next depending on available metals and this Bronze Age would last a very long time more than 2,000 years before iron began to replace bronze this beginning of Metallurgy was obviously a big RP forward for mining the first of fas people now needed to find holes containing copper and other metals that could be associated with it to make bronze there were a few places where these metals were present very near the surface this was the case around Lake Superior for example that these deposits were quickly depleted and it became necessary to start digging to extract more this was really the beginning of systematic metal mining some 5,000 years ago this time is also the moment when Urban civilizations emerged in part thanks to these bronze tools that were more productive for these early civilizations the most important activity always always remained agriculture but mining was generally the second most important economic resource and in all of them we see a range of different materials that were mined some to make tools like Metals Bas metals and others to provide building materials and input for works of art and crafts which include precious metals or gemstones an example of this can be found in Egypt ancient Egypt of the third millennium BC extracted a variety of materials there were semi-precious stones like malachite or turquoise there were precious metals especially gold Egypt itself was not very rich in Gold but to the South there was nuia which had some of the largest gold mines of the world in Antiquity and this Nubian gold always was one of the main reasons that Drew the Egyptians to invade and control neia to the south of their country a control that was not always effective because Nubia was large and prun to revolts as soon as the Egyptians loosen their grip a lot of the gold ornaments buried in ancient Egyptian tombs came from nuia but the Egyptians did not necessarily mine everything themselves for example they also used a lot of lapis Lazer but no evidence of functioning minds of lapis Lai in and around Egypt have ever been found so it is believe that this Stone came from Afghanistan and it would have arrived along trade routes that crossed the Middle East one early mining technique used by the Egyptians and they were not the only ones we know this was practiced around the world is called fire setting fire setting was very common in open pit minds or shallow Minds just under the surface because when they were deeper underground it was too complicated or dangerous and it was practiced from prehistory to the Middle Ages it consisted in setting fires against a rock to heat it which caused it to fracture by a thermal shock sometimes with the help of cold water that was thrown at it obviously it worked better in up cast Minds where the smoke could dissipate easily and the ground it was much more difficult and dangerous because of the smoke at a time when Stone tools were not always harder than the rock miners were trying to dig or later when metal tools were still expensive this fire setting technique was much more efficient and quick to obtain ores once the wall had fractured smaller blocks separated from the rock that contained or could be taken away and further sorted or smelted to extract Metals this technique disappeared in Europe during the Middle Ages as underground mindes became more common and in the following centuries it was increasingly replaced with explosives which fractured The Rock faster and were less dangerous to use the transition to the Bron age and later the Iron Age with harder tools together with techniques like fire setting these were the main factors that improved the yield of Minds in the Antiquity but around 2,000 years ago with the rise of the Roman Empire a new Leap Forward took place around the Mediterranean in Europe and in the Middle East why is that because the ramens developed large scale mining methods that had not been seen before especially the use of large volumes of water brought by aqueducts mining generally requires a lot of water to carry away debris for example or in slightly more advanced mining engineering to power machine like wheels that serve to raise hes from underground shafts and galleries or to sort holes from waste or even to dig into the Rock This is what is called hydraulic mining the use of jets of water the Romans did not use high pressure water like in some Modern mines but they used the power of running water with a form of mining called hershing what is this hershing is a method for mining or for prospection that uses a massive release of water to take away large quantities of soil at once or debris and reveal veins of ore water does a job that would take much longer manually and would be ex exhausting so concretely the ramens would fill large artificial reservoirs of water often with Aqueduct and release their content at once which obviously required engineering planning and infrastructures it made sense only for large scale operations all things the Romans were very good at when when they suspected that veins of ore could be present somewhere hidden under a layer of soil instead of digging randomly they would release a lot of water which would wash away the soil revealing the Bedrock and its possible veins of course this is rather destructive as a mining method there was no major damage to the environment because the Romans did not do that everywhere but nowadays that would be Unthinkable hasing did not disappear with the ramens however it remained in use long after Antiquity and into modern times it was still widely practiced in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries where it was called booming as I said the modern version of these water-based techniques which is much more targeted but still use these massive volumes of water is hydraulic mining with jets of pressurized water to break rocks and separate them from the walls of Mines but staying in Antiquity using this technique often combined with setting to fracture The Rock first and better iron tools the ramen pushed the productivity of their minds well above what had been seen earlier in Antiquity this efficiency was one of the pillars of their power it allowed them to massively increase the production of metals their minds were obviously very lab intensive but they also used machines in particular Wheels to raise holes and to pump underground water the problem when you start digging deeper and deeper is obviously that you often reach the groundwater table which can completely flood a mine in order to avoid it water has to be pumped to dewater the mine to dry it in large Roman mines like the riotinto coer mine in Spain there were large Wheels bed by people walking on them like on treadmills to raise water Spain was a major mining region for the ramens it was strategically important for different metals like copper tin zinc it also had silver mining resources were also one of the motivations for The Invasion and occupation of Great Britain the island of Britannia had a bit of gold and silver and also Thin Red then the locals had mined on a small scale for thousands of years after the conquest once they controlled Roman Britain the Romans started exploiting these resources methodically across what would later become England and Wales mining reached unprecedented Highs at the time of the peak of the Roman Empire but then like cities agriculture the general population and the economy it declined with the Empire especially in its Western half in Central and Western Europe the kind of large scale mines with Machinery that the Romans had put in place disappeared and would not come back for centuries demand for hes for Metals fell and it took centuries to before these demand returned to what it had been at its antique Peak but it did in medieval Europe and again in the Middle Ages mining experienced another search and big Transformations a big change for mining in the Middle Ages was the growing importance of iron iron is a relatively abundant resource there are plenty of places where iron can be mined and in Antiquity it was already a relatively common metal from the first millennium BC for weapons and tools the main difficulties to work with iron were more technical it required much higher temperatures than other metals so better furnaces and fuels and also there are ion holes of very different qualities sometimes it is very rich in metal but many ion hes are relatively poor still ion had many advantages against bronze and in particular its resistance it is significantly harder and in the last centuries of the Middle Ages the need the demand for iron boomed in Europe I told you already in previous stories about population growth and the periods of relative Prosperity that happened in medieval times in Europe for example in the 12th and 13th centuries or in the 15th century I told you about this for example in the history of the Crusades so there were these per periods of expansion whose signs manifested in many dimensions architecture urbanism the expansion of cultivated areas and all of this meant higher demand for iron not just because the population was growing but also because the late medieval period was very iron hungry for several reason reasons ion was needed for new agricultural tools like the plow share the medieval innovation in agriculture it was used more and more in construction Nails metallic parts to reinforce wooden constructions it was used in machines like Mills that multiplied it is more anecdotical but Crocs or other types of mechanisms made of metal also multiplied there were also more and more horses at the time and iron was necessary for their equipment to make hors shoes for example and finally another major source of demand for iron was the military Warfare it also required massive quantities of ir compared with past centuries weapons like heavy swords or lenses required more iron than ever before and so did armor for example a medieval Knight was typically equipped with around 100 PB of iron that’s 45 kg between his armor and weapons and he it was not just the knights at the same time fodal Lords and kings were increasingly inclined to recreate bigger standing armies that had to be equipped so for these reasons demand for iron and the number of blacksmith increased dramatically in the last centuries of the Middle Ages which spurred iron production and at the start of the production chain the mining of Iron Ore had to follow this demand this benefited iron mining but cool not so much to make iron furnaces are necessary and in order to make furnaces work some fuel is required but it wasn’t coal Coal was extracted occasionally but not on a large scale at the time because it was too cumbersome and not valuable enough to be transported on long distances contrary to metal or manufactured goods and there was an alternative charcoal that was produced using wood and used preferably for ION production to demand for mind goal would really take off in the 18th century when much larger quantities and a higher caloric efficiency became necessary for the nent industry but we were not there yet so with this growing demand and the interest in mining the use of machine to assist extraction in medieval Europe was revived and even pushed further than it had been by the Romans there was hushing this use of water that we talked about before and also the use of hydraulic power for other tasks for example water Mills were increasingly used to crush ore and to raise ore from the shafts of under ground minds and soon after in the 16th and 17th centuries they would be used to ventilate mining galleries with big Bellows powered by water Mills apart from Iron precious metals were also avidly sought after it is yet another aspect I told you about in past stories the scarcity of precious metals gold and to a lesser extent silver in medieval Europe these metals were scarce first because there was not much to mine in Europe and second because they tended to go away to be exported to the Muslim world or banum to pay for the products that Europe imported so in Central and Western Europe any mine of precious metals was valuable and strategically important it would be exploited as much as possible but this scarcity of these resources may have been an advantage in the long term because it made it necessary to innovate to dig deeper or to make the best of extracted OES in the 16th century this lack or this scarcity of precious metals was completely reversed when American Gold brought back to Spain and other commercial and Colonial riches from around the world began to arrive always more massively in the 16th century demand for Bas metal iron copper zinc tin lead only kept growing the knights in heavy full armor were no longer the masters of battlefields but now there were even more metal intensive weapons like artillery and for Naval construction metal chains plaques and nails were also in strong demand and ever more ships and larger ships were constantly required actually in Europe demand for iron has grown constantly from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century and the real takeoff had not even happened in the 16th century it would be during the Industrial Revolution with railroads or the massive views of metal in construction and again mining would change dramatically as the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and 19th century was approaching at the beginning of the 18th century mines in Europe were still far from the very large operations with thousands of miners that they would become in in industrial times but they became increasingly mechanized or used nonhuman power I mentioned water powerered machines before there were also animals horses were increasingly put to work in mining to drag wagons or power mechanical Wheels primitive railroads wooden at the start and then metallic were built in mind lifts were introduced to go up and down in deeper and deeper shafts and on a more structural level something else was happening with the profits that generated and the work organization they required Minds were also announcing the Industrial Revolution that was observed in England in particular and to a lesser extent in Germany or northern France profits accumulated thanks to mining operations the quantity of capital this generated would be available for the modern capitalist economy to get ignited with an early accumulation of capital mining was not the only the source of this Capital textile was another one so was banking these industries allowed the emergence of large fortunes large reserves of capital that were no longer only based on the ownership of land or of real estate this Capital became available to be invested in other productive assets and fund the Industrial Revolution it is not random that the industrial revolution first started in regions that had a combination of favorable factors Capital natural resources a Workforce an entrepreneurial spirit in the elite to Kickstart it mining was at the heart of these processes and when the Industrial Revolution became well in place mines also became a laboratory of the new industrial society that was appearing as much as for big factories and maybe even more because it seems no other industry was as physically demanding or dangerous as mining mines became the place where the major fight happened for workers rights for decent salaries and even a more ideological political fight against the capitalist order with the rise of socialism and there was more Minds were also social Laboratories for the organization of workers places where identities Emer Ed and could be a source of Pride there were families of minors it turned out to be way more than a job for generations of miners in Western countries this is an Heritage that increasingly belongs to the past to history but there are still EOS of it in our Societies in the memory of different families and traces around us starting with the landscapes in some regions the entire towns that were built to accommodate miners around mining sites so let’s talk about this entry into modern times and all these different aspects technically the Industrial Revolution allowed a massive increase in productivity in mind due to a more rational and efficient organization of Labor and also the introduction of engines steam powered and later electricity powered engines this allowed to make 19th century Minds larger and deeper than anything seen before first in the mining districts of England then in Continental Europe and in America before it spread to mines on all continents the variety of materials mind did not decrease and precious metals remained very sought after the 19th century was also the time of various gold rushes to California Alaska in Australia these were one of the motivations of the westward migration in the United States but economically and industrially the two most important Productions were iron and coal ion because as we have seen it was the one metal used in everything from consumer goods to infrastructures from weapons to construction or ships the need for iron in these nent industrial societies became insatiable as more and more countries transitioned to an industrial economy and coal because it became the most important fuel by far it powered industrial machines boats it was used for heating and even after the introduction of elect electricity and oil it remained in heavy use because it was burnt to produce electricity and it was such an efficient source of energy there were other important base metals like copper zinc tin lead but the two Essentials were coal and iron to put figures on that and give you an order of magnitude we can take the example of the United Kingdom around 1700 the UK produced about 1 million ton of coal annually 1 million may sound like a lot but that was really just 3,000 tons per day equivalent to a little Hill for the entire country and between different Minds it was wasn’t that much but in the following years at the beginning of the 18th century furnaces that made Iron began to be converted to Coal especially to Coke which is a type of pure coal with a high carbon content coal production began to grow steadily and by 1800 the century l it approached 10 million tons it had been multiplied by 10 in a century but then with the explosion of Metallurgy and the introduction of steam engines in many Industries it really took off in 1850 it reached about 70 million tons multiplied by seven in 50 years and it went on with the expansion of Industry railroads and at the end of the century electricity plans in 1900 to 1910 it stood at 250 million tons that is to say 250 times more than 200 years earlier there had been big productivity gains in mines but obviously the population of miners had also grown dramatically to extract all this for the most part this population of workers came from the countryside they formed a new communities around mines in one of the most important and quick social transformations of the Industrial Revolution together with Factory workers Millions of people moved to industrial areas in a few decades in America too the same happened with massive migration to Mining and industrial areas of the Northeast former Farmers former slaves immigrants they all became workers and miners out of necessity or in the hope of having a better life with higher salaries and in general they earned higher salaries and had better material conditions than the poor population in farming regions but at the cost of extremely tough working conditions in minds they would go down the pit where they worked six days a week for 8 to 10 hours shift hundreds or even in extreme cases thousands of feet underground they would break rock following veins of metal ore or coal load it on wagons and work in heat in poorly ventilated and poorly lit galleries with the constant risk of accidents deadly accidents were relatively common it could be galleries collapsing this is why you often see them reinforced with timber in Old minds or worse than that when an underground pocket of gas was reached and detonated this remains a well-known hazard in Coal Mines nowadays if exposed to a flame or a sparkle gas May explode and on top of the blast miners could stay prisoners underground with few hopes of being rescued and if it wasn’t underground accidents there were the long-term medical risks once again maximal in cold Minds due to the cold dust that caused lung diseases these terrible working conditions are the sacrifice that several generations of miners made for Western Europe and the United States to industrialize these conditions have disappeared in the west but in developing countries in particular in China that is now day the largest mining country in the world and has massive needs of metals and coal Morality In minds and very tough working conditions remain common this has not disappeared from the face of the world in these circumstances it is not surprising that miners were some of the first groups to organize to negotiate or sometimes confront their employers they had advantages when they became minors very often mining companies would provide housing you probably saw this entire towns of identical small Breck houses lined up these are the typical industrial towns that were built to house industry workers and miners so they had housing covered schools guaranteeing a basic education for children and a few benefits but at the cost of dreadful working conditions and important risks compared with living conditions at the time in poor rural areas it wasn’t bad and actually people moved voluntarily but mining jobs were also a kind of trap when a single employer controls all mining jobs in a town you cannot really quit if you are unhappy with your job it turned out to all so be a trap for the children they would naturally start working in the same mind because that’s all there was and all they knew about there is no shortage of family stories of miners who tried to push their children to study and live so they could have a better future for themselves because their parents knew how hard it would be for them but still on mining sites that were exploited for a long time there were dynasties of miners on several Generations there was also something appealing in becoming a minor despite the hardships The Pride Associated to this job and the sense of belonging probably even more than Factory workers miners of the 19th and early 20th centuries were United by the common experience of going down the pit the visceral fear of descending deep under the ground together and at the surface of sharing almost identical living conditions same houses same boss same pay same values mining communities were often the credle of the first workers organizations the first unions structures that were attempts at balancing the power struggle with their employers to get better and safer working conditions this often turned out to be very conflictual on many occasions soldiers were sent to quell miners revolts in ious countries some were killed and they were sometimes forced to get back to work the violence of these social conflicts of the 19th century is a bit forgotten nowadays but it was real and often tragic still over time and rather painfully their working conditions improved and it was not in vain working hours were reduced child labor which was widespread in Minds in the early 19th century was progressively eliminated they got Medical Care and pensions but it took decades and maybe all blue color workers owe a debt of gratitude to miners in Europe and in North America because what they obtained for themselves of F spilled over to other Industries in Western countries this social World in itself with its representations its values its hardships and also its pride has disappeared or is slowly dying in England or in France the last coal mines have already closed and in the US there are still some that the number of miners is constantly declining still let’s be aware of the Heartbreak for these people who knew a time when the sense of community around Minds was very strong with a common experience and all the sociability and identity that came with it mining techniques have contined to evolve miners no longer dig veins with a manual Peak obviously they Advance with jackhammers and large machines pressurized water mines are electrified and war is raised by machines to the surface in open cast mins of which there are several very large ones where I live in Chile because the country is the biggest copper producer in the world there are giant trucks that can transport dozens of tons of War at once it’s a world of drugs conveyor belts engines and vehicles that do what the miners of antiquity did manually now with incomparably higher levels of productivity in terms of volume of production mining today is bigger than ever our Industrial soci societies still consume more and more metals and mineral resources the biggest mining countries in the world by the volume and value of what they extract include China Australia Russia the United States Canada Brazil South Africa the Democratic Republic of Congo or Chile so mining is not going anywhere but it also raises different questions for the environment because it can create a range of problems it consumes resources especially a lot of water and water scarcity or conflicts around the usage of water can be directly caused by mines in other cases near densely populated areas it can create risks of collapse of calories even and in particular decades after mines have been closed in different parts of the UK in the north of France or in Germany where very deep mins have been exploited near populated towns and cities that is sometimes a problem that makes the ground cave in the there are also underground fires in cold mines that can happen this can happen not just in Minds sometimes underground cold veins can catch fire by themselves and burn for years there are different towns that had to be abandoned because of this an example is Centralia in Pennsylvania a town that is said to have inspired the video game Silent Hill it had to be evacuated due to an underground fire that has been going on since 1962 on top of this other possible environmental damages include the pollution of soils by materials that are extracted or that are used to refine holes the contamination of groundw erosion so mining is rarely neutral what are the record-breaking mines around the world today the deepest one the deepest mine is a gold mine in South Africa called bonang which is also considered to be one of the most substantial gold mines in the world that explains why it was dug that deep it reaches a depth of 2 and 1/2 miles below ground level that is to say about 4 km down there at the bottom of the mine the temperature of the rock reaches 150° fah 66° C so the galleries have to be cooled down and insulated for the miners to be able to work if you like lifts and other South African Gold Mine Moab ksong has the world’s largest steel wire rope that can take workers 10,000 ft or 3 kilm underground in a single Journey op pit mines can also be spectacular many copper mines are like this the deepest one in the world is Bingham Canyon mine in Utah it is a 3900 ft hole in the ground 1.2 km deep millions of tons of rock have been taken away to dig that hole the up pit mine with the largest volume of material taken out is another copper mine chuki kamata in the north of Chile but it is wider than Bingham Canyon so it is on the second deepest the largest underground mine not the deepest but the largest is a Swedish Iron Mine the kiruna mine in the North of Sweden it was dug around one of the richest iron body ever discovered the exploitation began in 1898 more than a century ago first as an open mind and then underground there would be a lot more to say about the world of Mining and I hope this introduction makes you want to know more but for today our journey is reaching its conclusion you can now let go and fall asleep or pick another story from my library I be back soon with another one and in the meantime sleep well sweet dreams are