Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

But today the nature of cleaving and digging is of a different order entirely. For evidence of this, consider Mount Whaleback, just outside the town of Newman. This is one of the great icons of modern-day mining. The mountain itself is long gone, replaced with a hole 6 kilometres long, 3 kilometres wide and hundreds of metres deep. The entire top surface of the earth has been scraped away by enormous diggers, ground into chunks, carried on vast, mile-long trains and thence shipped to China or Japan, where it has become the skyscrapers of Shanghai and the rails that carry bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka. Twenty-first-century Asia—and elsewhere besides—was built out of Pilbara iron.