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Mines/Australia

Cloudbreak mine

Cloudbreak mine, Australia. Producing, open pit, mining iron ore.

Why Cloudbreak is famous

USGS treats Cloudbreak as one iron ore operation in the Chichester Ranges of the East Pilbara that includes Christmas Creek, WhiteKnight, Mount Lewin, Mount Nicholas and Flinders. Fortescue owns it fully. The 2021 capacity listed is 55 Mt a year.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Banded iron formation (Superior and Algoma types)

Cloudbreak today

Where iron ore is mined todayMining in Australia

Where next

People

OwnedAndrew ForrestCloudbreak began mining in May 2008. Fortescue owns it fully.3

Mines

ExamplesRoy HillRoy Hill and Cloudbreak each had 55 Mt a year of listed capacity in 2021.1HereChristmas CreekUSGS counts Christmas Creek within the Cloudbreak operation.1

Deposit types

An example ofBanded iron formation (Superior and Algoma types)Cloudbreak belongs to the banded iron formation family of deposits.4

Sources

  1. 2020-21 Minerals Yearbook, Australia (advance release) US Geological Survey
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv (modern operations table) prospectortrails.com internal data
  3. A footprint without parallel (Fortescue) Australian Mining Review
  4. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

Pictures on this page: Andrew Forrest (cropped).jpg, Chatham House (CC BY 2.0).

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Autonomous trucks by RobSimmons223311, CC BY-SA 4.0; Conveyors, rail and ports by Kabelleger / David Gubler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Kirunavaara gruva, Kiruna., Fotograf okänd, / Europeana (Public Domain Mark 1.0).