Material World by Ed Conway

Author:Ed Conway [Conway, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

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* The electrolytic revolution also gave rise to all sorts of other discoveries and products. It was thanks to electrolysis that aluminium became a mass-producible product, and that salt could be turned into caustic soda and chlorine, which in turn could be used to create countless other products.

11

The Hole

Chuquicamata, Chile

At first glance Chuquicamata looks a lot like many of the other small mountain towns you find throughout the north of Chile.

Stroll down the main road and you see a bank, a cinema, a library and a smart little hotel. There is a playground with slides and swings and a garish model of Pinocchio. There is a plaza with a bandstand and a small stadium—the Estadio Anaconda.

As in so many other towns in this region of Chile, an area which used to be part of Bolivia, nearly every other street is named after heroes from Chilean history: here is Calle Lord Cochrane, after the British naval officer who helped the country fight its way to independence, and there, running parallel, is Calle Arturo Prat, after the hero of the Saltpetre War. The painted surfaces of the houses glimmer beneath the cobalt sky that dwarfs all human life here in the high desert.

But there are two things about Chuquicamata that are very unusual indeed. The first is found if you follow the main road as it snakes north-east away from the town square, towards the mountains on the horizon. After a minute or two the residential areas give way to enormous warehouses of concrete and corrugated iron. There are strange dark pools, dusty railyards and piles of rock everywhere. Then, after a few more turns of the wheel, you pass through a tunnel and suddenly before you is an enormous crevasse. Here, at the top of what should be a hill, is the most almighty canyon: the bottom is barely visible; the sides are steep enough to induce a vertiginous shudder.

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]

Copper has been mined here for centuries. In 1899, a decade and a bit before the modern story of this mine began, explorers happened across the remains of a miner here, buried a couple of metres underground along with his tools. Like the ancient Celtic miner at the salt mine in Hallein he had been trapped when the tunnel he was excavating had collapsed. Despite being many centuries old (radiocarbon dating subsequently put it at around ad 550) his body had been preserved by a film of copper-rich salts whose antibacterial qualities had helped protect it from decay.

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