Kiruna - it's all about i-ron

I-ron (or iron, when not pronounced by drunk Kiruna youths), is the reason for Kiruna's existence. On my last visit here I was unable to do the mine tour, but I was determined not to be foiled this time. (An aside from the the cruise ship bar. Last time on this ferry, I spent my time trying not to be seen by a bunch of scarred up and very scary looking Russian labourers who were drinking their way from Tallinn to Stockholm and back again. This time, the band has stopped, but a bunch of retirees are doing the limbo. At least the photo-obsessed pelican hasn't come back...)

The Kiruna ore deposit is a shaped like a big credit card, jammed into a mountain. It's about 4km wide, a couple of hundred metres thick, and descends at least a couple of kilometres into the ground at a slight angle. The mine started as an open cut mine, but has been underground since about the 50's or so. Since the ore is on a bit of angle, the technique they use is to work from the side 'below' the ore. As the ore is removed, the rock from the side above (the 'fall' side) falls into the gap, which leads to the ground slowly subsiding on the fall side.

Guess which side the town of Kiruna is sitting on.

This leads to the development that they'll have to move the town in the next few years. They've actually tested out the idea of just picking up every house and trucking it down the road, but ended up being a bit of a hassle, so they'll just knock most of it down and rebuild again. I'm not sure which side this will be on, but hopefully it will be on the other side.

The mine tour was ok - we took a bus which went about 700m underground into the mine, where a tour guide took us through a bunch of installations that described how the mine worked. The mine seems a pretty simple affair - keeping in mind the credit card analogy, they drill down on the fall side, establish a level to work from, then knock out the ore from above the send it to the surface via skips. Everything is big, hard core, and occasionally surprising. The ore skips travel at about 70 km/h up the shafts, the dump trucks are electric with a windup cord (just like your vacuum cleaner at home), and a lot of the machinery is controlled by remote from the surface. Apparently a Peugoet once came up in the skip, so it would appear that miners are not devoid of a sense of humour.

Once they get the ore, they smash it into powder, bake it into little balls, then stick it on a train where it is taken to Narvik to get shipped to the rest of the world. They're very proud of their ore - it's the higher quality one (magnetite, as opposed to haematite), so it's more pure and less expensive to refine.