Giant Hole in the Ground

Giant Hole in the Ground: Rio Tinto Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Rio Tinto Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer

Bingham Canyon Mine from the International Space Station 2007
Courtesy NASA
Bingham Canyon Mine from the International Space Station 2007. This astronaut photograph ISS015-E-29867 was acquired September 20, 2007, by the Expedition 15 crew with a Kodak 760C digital camera using an 800 mm lens. The image is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast.
Courtesy NASA

Kennecott Mine from Outside
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer Kennecott Mine from Outside
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer

Years ago, I was flying in an airplane headed into Salt Lake when the captain came on the intercom and suggested we look out the windows. Below us was a truly huge hole in the ground. This was my first look at the Kennecott open pit copper mine.

In 1847, when Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers arrived in the Utah territory, this bit of land we were flying over was an 8,000ft mountain, part of the range the Native Americans called the Oquirrhs. Back then two brothers were grazing their cattle in these mountains when they noticed some gold that had washed down the mountain and settled in a sandy stream bed. They took the gold and showed it to Brigham Young. Brigham Young told them to “forget it.” Growing food for the survival of the settlers was his top priority.

The Bingham boys went back to grazing cattle, but by 1873 the news had gotten out that there was gold in these hills. People started to move in, many of them recent immigrants. The Finns and Swedes settled up Carr Canyon, while the Austrians and Slavs settled near the Highland Boy mine. The town of Bingham grew up around 30 saloons, its many brothels , as well as many boarding houses where single men rented a room and took their meals. I really enjoyed reading a memoir written by Violet Boyce, whose Aunt Becky ran one of these boarding houses. She tells us the softer side of life in the early mining town, like one miner, Pete Kalvos, who had a beloved pet magpie. Now this bird was the chief suspect when Aunt Becky’s thimble, teaspoons, and jeweled pin disappeared. Aunt Becky got so mad she took the bird outside and told it to “git.” Joe moped around the house until the bird returned. Luckily by then Aunt Becky had cooled off, because some repair work on the chimney had revealed the magpie nest and all the missing items.

Everything changed in Bingham Canyon in 1906 when new entrepreneurs and engineers decided the real future of the canyon was in copper, and the best way to get it out was with an open pit mine. Dynamite started blasting away the hillsides. Violet writes how vases were knocked off shelves and pictures turned sideways on the walls in her house. As the mine kept expanding, the walls of her house crumbled. Eventually the whole town was devoured.

Nowadays, if you go to the Visitor Center at the Kennecott mine, you can stand on the viewing platform on the upper lip of the huge bowl-shaped pit. It’s a breath taking 2 ½ miles wide, ¾ of a mile deep – and still getting bigger. Trucks the size of two-story houses lumber up the inside of the bowl carrying away the newly blasted debris. It now takes 2 tons of this mix of rock, dirt and ore to eventually produce 9 pounds of pure copper.

The story of this giant hole in the ground is woven into Utah’s history, but it’s also left its mark on our planet Earth. The Kennecott open pit copper mine is one of a handful of man-made structures that can be seen from the International Space Station as it passes over us, 250 miles away.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy NASA and Mary Heers,
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Anderson, Howe and Wakeman
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

Crump, Scott, The Oquirrh Mountains, Utah History Encyclopedia, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/o/OQUIRRH_MOUNTAINS.shtml

Strack, Don, Years of Discovery, to 1863, Railroads and Mining in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, Discovery to 1863, UtahRails.net, https://utahrails.net/bingham/bingham-discovery.php

The Bingham Mine – Our National Historic Landmark, Rio Tinto, https://www.kennecott-groundbreakers.com/stories/the-bingham-mine—our-national-historic-landmark

Milligan, Mark, GeoSights: A View of the World’s Deepest Pit – Bingham Canyon Mine Overlook, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, Survey Notes, v. 49 no. 2, May 2017, https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/geosights-bingham-canyon-mine/

Bingham Canyon Mine, USA, Captured 20 April 2021, by the MSI instrument, aboard the Sentinel-2 satellite, NASA, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/worldview-image-archive/bingham-canyon-mine-usa

1904 to 2022, Bingham Mine through the Years, https://youtu.be/yvoQuH9C2d0?si=wQhMZWXYs-M-zclW

Massive landslide at Utah copper mine generates wealth of geophysical data, GSA Today, The Geological Society of America, https://rock.geosociety.org/net/gsatoday/archive/24/1/pdf/gt1401.pdf

POCKING: Potentially the “best” technique for restoring remote canyon landscapes during mine reclamations

Pocking for Cottonwood-Wilberg mine reclamation Courtesy & Copyright Chris Brown
Pocking for Cottonwood-Wilberg mine reclamation
Courtesy & Copyright Chris Brown
In Utah, when a coal mine closes, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining (OGM) is the agency responsible for overseeing the reclamation.

PacifiCorp is a mining company that provides electrical utility to one million customers in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming via Rocky Mountain Power. When it submitted the Cottonwood-Wilberg mine reclamation proposal, it claimed a sedimentation pond which catches run off, would not be needed. OGM was skeptical and initially rejected the plan.
Dennis Oakley, senior mine engineer at PacifiCorp said, “We explored the state and federal regulations and found there was some latitude if we could show we were using the best technology currently available.”

Tom Thompson, GIS Manager at OGM said, “Technology has come a long way, if we leverage it correctly we could do a lot better for our environment.”

The method PacifiCorp claimed as the best technology available was deep gouging, or “pocking”; a technique used to prevent erosion and stimulate vegetation growth on steep sloped landscapes.

To use pocking, the natural canyon slopes are first restored, then pocks three feet in diameter and one-and-a-half feet deep are dug into the slopes next to each other in a random and discontinuous fashion. The landscape soon resembles the surface of a golf ball with thousands of dimples.

Green dyed hydro-mulching, which contains native seeds, moisture and a protective layer of mulch is then sprayed over the entire pocked landscape.

When it rains the pocks capture the water, forming mini ponds. The moisture is slowly absorbed into the ground, preventing run off and giving the seeds a moist environment for growth.

Each year the sides of the pocks slowly erode into themselves, and the vegetation becomes established and spreads. Eventually the pocks fill with sediment and fade into a natural looking stable slope.

If pocking is the best technology currently available – then OGM wanted to know.

With the help of PacifiCorp, OGM set up the Cottonwood-Wilberg mine as a research site to determine the efficiency of pocking.

To add additional expertise to the research, OGM applied for Utah Legislature appropriated funds, to access to the knowledge of Doug Ramsey, the director of the Remote Sensing and GIS Laboratory, in the Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University, and his graduate student Chris Brown.

Ramsey and Brown explain, The RS/GIS lab is evaluating the pocks by using drone imagery of the entire landscape to create 3D models and topographic maps that identify where the vegetation is growing, and the depth of each pock across multiple seasons and years to show if the pocks are eroding as expected.

PacifiCorp installed monitoring devices around the reclaimed site so it could measure the amount of precipitation, the vegetation growth over time, and the sediment load of the runoff above and below the disturbed areas.

Oakley explains, “It’s our theory that the sediment levels of the background runoff will be equal to, or less than the runoff at the bottom of the disturbed area.”

Ramsey visited the site in June 2019 and found vegetation was already growing in the bottom of the pocks.

Data from the site will be gathered and analyzed over the next few years. A key part of this monitoring work will be a manual describing the drone data collection and analysis methods so OGM can establish a monitoring protocol for other reclamation sites.

Keenan Storrar, hydrologist from OGM, said, “We hope this research on the pocking technique, which PacifiCorp helped develop, will be published for future operators use.”

This is Shauna Leavitt and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright © Chris Brown
Audio: Courtesy
Text: Shauna Leavitt, Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Quinney College of Natural Resources, Utah State University

Sources & Additional Reading

Cottonwood-Wilberg Mine, Emery County, Utah Reclamation, US Department of the Interior, https://eros.usgs.gov/doi-remote-sensing-activities/2018/osm/cottonwood-wilberg-mine-emery-county-utah-reclamation

Cottonwood-Wilberg Mine, Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining, Utah Department of Natural Resources, https://www.ogm.utah.gov/coal/minedetail.php?C0150019