Stories

Five hundred years of mining, told as films.

Scroll through the hill that became the Big Hole, the rushes that built cities, the silver mountain that paid for an empire, the deepest copper pits on Earth and the cobalt that powers your phone. Every figure is sourced.

The stories

1867–1914Diamonds · South Africa

The Big Hole, Kimberley

A low hill dug by hand to 240 m: 22 million tonnes of rock for 2,722 kg of diamonds, and the merger that made De Beers.

1848–2025Gold and lithium · Worldwide

Gold rushes, then and now

California, Victoria, the Witwatersrand and the Klondike, then the lithium rush: the same story with different metals.

1545–2026Silver · Bolivia

Potosí, the mountain of silver

One red mountain in the Andes fed the first global trade, through forced labour and mercury. Next door lies a salt flat full of lithium.

1906–2026Copper · Utah and Chile

The biggest copper pits

Bingham Canyon and Chuquicamata, the landslide nobody died in, and a century in which copper output grew 46 times.

1906–2026Copper and cobalt · DR Congo

Congo's copper and cobalt

Copper crosses used as money, the uranium in a New York warehouse, and the country that now mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt.

Across the stories

  1. 1545Silver found on Cerro Rico; Potosí founded in April
  2. 1611Potosí's population reported at about 160,000
  3. 1848James Marshall finds gold at Sutter's Mill, Coloma, California
  4. 1871Diamonds found on Colesberg Kopje: the New Rush begins
  5. 1888De Beers Consolidated Mines incorporated on 13 March
  6. 1896Gold on Bonanza Creek, Yukon, 16 August
  7. 1906Utah Copper begins open-pit mining with steam shovels
  8. 1906Union Minière du Haut-Katanga is founded
  9. 1942The Manhattan Project buys the Staten Island ore
  10. 2013The Manefay slide at Bingham Canyon, 10 April
  11. 2025World lithium mine output reaches about 290,000 t

Why tell mining as stories

Every mine is a sequence of decisions: a find, a rush, a fight over who owns what, a deeper hole, a new technology, a merger, a closure. The same sequence is playing out again with lithium, copper and cobalt. These films use public records and statistics (USGS, the World Gold Council, the IEA, national park and heritage agencies, company filings) to show how it happened before, and what is different this time.

For figures by mineral and country, see the minerals guides, critical minerals lists and mining by country.