On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:52:19 -0400, Wild_Bill wrote:

A friend photographed his aerial view flying over a long ago closed
copper mining operation in NM.. the vast scale of those mines can't be
appreciated by looking at pictures in textbooks.

Check Norilsk in Siberia/Russia. It's similar latitude to Alaskan North
Slope, but it's an industrial city with population of 100,000 and a mile-
wide, half-mile deep hole in the ground, whereas people commute to the
Slope oilfields by flying in and out. Norilsk also apparently holds the
record for most polluted city in the world. Russians are tough people.