Most of the surface infrastructure for this particular mine had been dismantled several years prior, but there was still a hole in the ground-a concrete cylinder roughly seven thousand feet deep. The shafts in Welkom were among the deepest that had ever been sunk, plunging vertically for a mile or more and opening, at different levels, onto cavernous horizontal passages that narrowed toward the gold reefs: a labyrinthine network of tunnels far beneath the city. Large deposits of gold remained, though the ore was of poor grade and situated at great depths, making it prohibitively expensive to mine on an industrial scale. ![]() There were close to fifty shafts in an area roughly the size of Brooklyn, but most of these mines had been shut down in the past three decades. ![]() Welkom was once the center of the world’s richest goldfields. A few years ago, a mining company was considering reopening an old mine shaft in Welkom, a city in South Africa’s interior.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |