7 Biggest Holes On Earth

1. Mir Mine also called Mirny Mine was an open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Eastern Siberia, Russia. The mine is 525 meters (1,720 ft) deep and has a diameter of 1,200 m (3,900 ft), and is the second largest excavated hole in the world, after Bingham Canyon Mine. The airspace above the mine is closed for helicopters because of a few incidents in which they were sucked in by the downward air flow.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 2. The Big Hole is located in the city of Kimberley which is the capital of the Northern Cape of South Africa. Today the Big Hole is some 1,500 feet wide and over 42 acres in surface. When above ground mining stopped at the Big Hole in 1914, it was some 785 feet deep.

  

  

 3. The Bingham Canyon Mine is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles (1.2 km) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covering 1,900 acres (7.7 km?). According to Kennecott, it is the world's largest man-made excavation.

 

  

  

  

  

 4. The Diavik Diamond Mine is a diamond mine in the North Slave Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada, about 300 kilometres (186 miles) north of Yellowknife.

 

  

  

 5. The Great Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 100 kilometres (62 mi) from the mainland and Belize City.

 

  

  

 6. Glory Hole - Monticello Dam, California A glory hole is used when a dam is at full capacity and water needs to be drained from the resevoir. Close-up of Monticello Dam. Its the largest in the world, enabling it to consume 400 cubic feet of water every second. The Monticello Glory Hole can be seen at the top left of this photo. Water entering the top shoots out seconds later below.

 

  

  

  

 7. Guatemala Sinkhole. 80 feet in diameter and 15 feet deep, a huge sinkhole opened up in the middle of Montrose Avenue after a water main break flooded the tarmac. A sinkhole is caused when water (usually rainwater or sewage) is soaked up by the earth on a large scale, resulting in the ground collapsing.