The Fimiston Open Pit, colloquially known as the Super Pit, is an open-pit mine in Australia. It was Australia's largest open cut gold mine until 2016 when it was surpassed by the Newmont Boddington gold mine also in Western Australia. The Super Pit is located off the Goldfields Highway on the south-east edge of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The pit is oblong in plan view and is approximately 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and over 600 metres deep.
Fimiston Open Pit gold mine, c. 2005
Fimiston Open Pit (Super Pit) gold mine panorama, 2019 Aug
Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique that extracts rock or minerals from the earth using a pit, sometimes known as a borrow pit.
Rock blasting at the large open-pit Twin Creeks gold mine in Nevada, United States. Note the size of the excavators for scale (foreground, left), and that the bottom of the mine is not visible.
The giant bucket-wheel excavators in the German Rhineland coal mines are among the world's biggest land vehicles.
Kittilä Gold Mine in Kittilä, Finland is the largest primary gold producer in Europe.
Note the angled and stepped sides of the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine, Australia.
