I downloaded the MSHA's (Mine Safety and Health Administration) public datasets and create a visualization of all the mines in the US complete with the operators and details on each site.
I'm pretty sure for me "mining.fyi" wouldn't have created any associations with landmines (although "mines.fyi" does seem to match the contents of the website closer).
It'd be really interesting to see A/B testing results about what most people associate the word "mines" with (I wouldn't be surprised if that would be landmines in this day and age).
Even "mine.fyi" would be better at not making me think "landmine", although that would instead get read as "belonging to me".fyi.
I assume this is probably because most people don't see mines (as in gold mines) mentioned in plural very often. Or if someone does refer to multiple mines at once, they usually also specify the type of mine at the same time, like, "the cadmium mines in [country]" or similar. Or if talking about old, abandoned mines in an area, they're usually referred to as such.
The word "mines" on its own without an adjective usually does mean landmines, I think.
(I also immediately assumed this was about landmines.)
The US government has been pretty good about cleaning up the UXO it knows about, which means what's left is the UXO it doesn't know about. You'll find it near most of the current and former testing ranges, particularly Yuma Proving Ground where there's trails leading right from the adjacent BLM land into areas with potential UXO. The only real barriers are a few signs and the law.
Please reduce the aggregation of map markers. It's not helpful to group every mine in southwest US in a single point in California that makes it look like they are none in any other state. I see this all the time on maps and it's really frustrating. Aggregate markers are helpful when the individual points are actually overlapping on the map, otherwise they obscure location data.
Strong disagree — aggregate markers were super useful when browsing the map on mobile! Maybe need to add a flag for mobile vs. desktop, but the experience would be a lot worse on mobile without them.
I tried it on mobile. The clustering reduces it to 6 points for all of North America. My phone has over 3 million pixels, surely there’s room for more detail than that.
It includes what most would call quarries and it doesn't include anywhere near all of them (there are basically infinite invisible quarries everywhere to make concrete because it doesn't transport well).
Just a heads-up that this is nowhere near "all the mines" in Nevada.
I've explored quite a few personally, live by some, and that entire list of my memories is missing.
NV is also not included in the list of top 10 states which is a clear indicator of missing data fwiw.
This doesn't seem to be complete. It's missing the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, for example, which should be southeast of Carlsbad, NM. It's a underground salt (metal/non-metal) mine, and MSHA definitely regulates it
Based on the info if you click into them, likely no. I would have expected them to be incidental materials from tunneling, but reading the description that's not the case.
I looked for all my local mines and none of them are on here. It seems that all of the listed mines for California are stone quarries. It omits the numerous other mines.
I see quarries everywhere, and they’re kind of required near any city or road project around Australia. Never considered them as a mine though… more like a ‘general resource site’?
Wouldn't that also filter out every open cut surface mine that strips overburden and directly extracts near surface coal, copper deposits, iron ore, etc.
Not every mine is a "classic" underground mine with tunnels, etc.
See (for example) the W.Australian SuperPit gold mine which consolidated every shaft mine in a particular region into a single open pit that goes deeper than any pre existing underground mine in that area.
This seems to include cement works and other processing plants that have somewhat mine-like output but aren't actually extracting anything from the ground at that site.
There seem to be more quarries in where I looked (near Reno) than mines. 16:1 in Allegheny is not on there - interesting place. It’s still semi active.
under 50, actual underground mines for metals, under 175 total open pit and underground mines for metal
the real numbers for rock quarys * are hidden, and I must assume that they are also
a small portion of the "total"
* sell actual blocks of stone vs gravel/fill/agregate
The US, like many countries and regions, has poor coverage of abandoned, closed, and shuttered mine sites despite such sites still posing an ongoing danger in terms of imminent physical danger (collapse, decay, etc) and untreated waste piles and ponds leaching toxins into ground waters, etc.
To answer the question posed, "how many (US?) mine sites pose a danger of type {X}" requires crawling the US BLM datasets, the OSHA datasets, the archived (from when active) MSHA datasets, and having a some luck onside for various specific sites due to large gaps and periods of not caring at all.
Various transnational global mining companies (Rio Tinto, et al) have extensive datasets on global resources and minesites, both operational, and past and potential future sites.
No, these are the cool ones that take stuff out of the ground, not the ones that destroy everything above them