It's so big it affects the weather above it and aircraft have to be careful.

I haven't visited in years but back when they had a visitor's center you could drive up to, it was a pretty amazing place to see.

And useless trivia for the day: The owner of that mine, Rio Tinto, also owns the old 60's TV western series "Death Valley Days." When Rio Tinto bought out US Borax (the "20 mule team" stuff), the TV show was part of the deal.

So you'll see the Rio Tinto name on the credits now if you happen to tune into the show on some cable feed.

Is this the same Rio Tinto that blew up the aboriginal site in Australia?

Some kind of convection anomaly, perhaps?

It looks like something you would carve out in Minecraft.

Yet Albany is still a bigger pit.

Yes

Likely--They are not exactly good guys.

Scumbags.....

pretty interesting looking when flying in

Agreed. I flew over it the other day. I had no idea what it was, but took a photo I was so impressed by the scale. Stumbled upon the answer last night watching a documentary on the Pebble copper mine they are trying to build in Alaska.

It's also so big that it obliterated an entire mountain, and took something like 1/2 to 2/3 of a city out. There are historic photos from a street looking down a road near the mine, which to have the same perspective today, you'd need to be flying a drone some 200 feet in the air.

Utahn here, Rio Tinto is not a good neighbor.

The Salt Lake Valley usually has the worst air pollution nationally/globally during the winter months as it’s set in a bowl and the temperature inversion traps everything until a storm blows it away. This mine contributes to 30% of all pollution, that’s 10x more than the next polluter that is the Chevron refinery.

And this is not mentioning their hazardous spills, or the trendy/high income Daybreak neighborhood that’s built of former polluted mine land. Fun fact: you’re not allowed to any grow food in the ground there.

Yikes. Unsurprising.

The Pebble mine in Alaska looks like an environmental nightmare in the making.

Super interesting Frontline documentary on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NNlVrcthXI

Bingham Canyon makes a cameo.

ya, and being built on tailings in a flood plain isn't exactly neat either.

Im sorry what? I am an environmental geologist who was trained at the university of Utah. I have studied this subject in depth. everything you have said is completely wrong. industry as a whole accounts for around 10% of Utah's air pollution. I have never seen a single publication putting Kennecott's numbers anywhere close to 30% the highest number I have ever seen for them was 18% of total pollutants and that was including every gram of overburden moved. also daybreak exists as part of a massive cleanup project. all of that land has been cleaned to an inch of its life and millions of dollars have been put into cleaning up the water in that area.

Probably downdrafts and updrafts

Given the Great Salt Lake isn't visible from space, I find it hard to believe something much smaller could be

Not defending the mine but I don't see how it could possibly produce 30% of pollution in the valley. Where'd you hear that?

Also there are community gardens at Daybreak. Definitely not true that you can't grow food there because of toxic ground. Maybe because of HOA regulations.

Everything on the surface of the earth is visible from space. It depends on your optics. Technically an ant is visible from space.

For reference, 1 mile = 5280 feet.

The size makes the bigger-than-a-house dump trucks look small.

The Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, here’s the link https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/rio-tinto-kennecott/.

And the Daybreak source are friends who were original Daybreak owners from the mid 2000s. The rules might have changed, but per the Salt Lake Tribune, the ground water below the city is heavily contaminated (estimated for the next 40-100 years) with heavy metals as Daybreak is a former tailings pond. The Deseret News did an interesting piece on a cancer cluster in residents around the Daybreak development. They claim Daybreak is safe, but it still will always be an EPA Superfund site. Obviously developers will bury anything that gets in the way of money. But I don’t think it’s prudent to say there will be zero consequences.

That stat was pulled from the Utah Physicians for a Healthy environment, link. I recognize this is an interest group.

But with that said, it was also revealed this month that a single magnesium plant makes 10-25% of all PM 2.5 air pollution in the Valley. Interesting snippet from the NOAA report: “Prior to the NOAA study, the chemical composition of PM 2.5 in northern Utah, and how it forms, had received considerably less attention than in other regions of the nation despite the severity of the problem in Utah.” https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2931/One-facility-makes-a-big-contribution-to-Salt-Lake’s-winter-brown-cloud

I believe Utah State University (will need to double check) is launching a further investigation into who pollutes the most. It’s shocking really that we don’t track this seriously, but the state government turns a blind eye, as industry always gets what they want. I’d expect further studies to be quite damning of industry, and especially Rio Tinto.

Apparently my grandpa lived in a town near there that no longer exists because the pit expanded to where the town once was.

Thanks for sharing. Common sense says that Kennecott's a big polluter and not something you want in your backyard, regardless of exactly where those numbers land.

FWIW, DEQ claims that point sources (eg, industrial operations) of PM2.5 (main pollutant during inversion) are about 13% of the total with about 50% coming from mobile sources (vehicles). This is part of the reason why I think the 30% number seems way overblown.

I've experienced health problems and been misdiagnosed with asthma multiple times because of issues triggered by the bad air over the past few years in particular, so I don't underestimate the effects of it at all.