2007-12-29 Industrial terraforming for a better world 1

Visiting the desert of a lignite [german: Braunkohle] open-pit mining, also known as opencast mining and open-cut mining at Garzweiler (Google maps, scroll out).

The whole city of Garzweiler was completely resettled from 1984 to 1989 to another place. After that, the excavators came to dig - the largest and heaviest vehicles in the world at 13,500 tons (see article at wikipedia.com here).

It's like terraforming a planet. In the background you can see the Niederaußem lignite power plant, which blows such a huge amount of steam into the air, that in winter it will fall down to earth as so called "industral snow".

For more information (in english) see here.

 

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