But this is no canyon, this is the Chuquicamata copper mine. It is a monumental hole gouged out of the mountainscape of the Atacama Desert. Longer and wider than New York’s Central Park, it is so deep that if you dropped the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, into it, the whole thing, lightning rod and all, would be completely swallowed by this fissure. More earth has been removed from here than anywhere else in history, making it one of the more unlikely engineering marvels of the modern age.[1]
