Bingham Canyon Mine, located near Salt Lake City, is the world's deepest man-made open pit excavation. The mine is 2.75 miles (4,5km) across and 0.75 mile (1,2km) deep. Since mining operations started in 1906, Bingham Canyon Mine has been the granddaddy of all copper mines. When you're talking about the actual size of the mine, Bingham Canyon is simply the largest copper mine in the USA. If the mine was a stadium, it could seat nine million people.
Bingham Canyon is primarily a copper mine, but it has also yielded a wide range of byproduct metals. These include 620 tons of gold, 5,000 tons of silver, 276 tons of molybdenum and large amounts of platinum and palladium. The Kennecott mining company extracts daily approximately 450,000 tons of rock out of the mine. With these production statistics, it's no wonder that the Bingham Canyon Mine has been nicknamed "the Richest Hole on Earth."