Chuquicamata

The crater is so large it generates its own weather. Standing at the viewing platform of Chuquicamata, the trucks at the bottom are specks — 400-tonne machines reduced to insects by a pit 4.3 kilometres wide, 3 kilometres long, and one kilometre deep. Localised dust storms spin inside the crater while the desert above stays still. This is the largest open-pit copper mine on Earth, and the scale does not register until you are standing at its edge.

Chuquicamata in Chile's Antofagasta Region has been mined since pre-Columbian times — a preserved pre-Inca mummy found in the excavations carried copper items from this exact seam. Modern industrial mining began in 1910, and the pit has expanded continuously since. In 2007, the entire town of Chuquicamata — home to 25,000 copper workers and their families — was evacuated and demolished as the mine expanded to consume it. The ghost infrastructure of the former town is visible from the viewing platform. CODELCO, Chile's state copper company, runs twice-daily guided tours that descend to observation points where the terraced walls reveal a century of extraction in sedimentary layers. The mine produces approximately 11% of the world's copper supply.