Quite what constitutes the biggest mine on the planet is a matter of some debate. By one measure—the amount of metal extracted from a single place—the iron ore mines of Australia, Brazil or Russia would easily surpass this place. But since iron ore tends to be found in far greater concentrations than copper, with about 60 per cent in each hunk of ore, compared with barely 0.6 per cent in copper ore, you need to move a lot more earth for each tonne of copper than each tonne of iron. Based on my back-of-an-envelope sums (surprisingly scant research has been done on this topic), copper mining
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