The World's Largest Gold Mine | Super Structures | Spark

[Music] on a stone-age island at the ends of the earth is an astonishing superstructure whose very existence defies imagination to build it men climbed mountains and no one could climb gave their lives building roads no one could build drive the world's biggest trucks and shovels where they could not go thousands of feet into the sky into a deadly realm of blinding fogs and perilous quests for staggering riches they did it all to mine the hidden fortune a mountain made of gold [Music] [Music] in our age of satellites cellphones and cyberspace there are still a few hidden places left on earth one of them is Irian Jaya a land born of fire ground by ice where pathless jungles swelter an equatorial heat we're freezing mists envelops soaring mountains and men still live untouched by time some 75 miles from its jungle Shores a wall of mountains soars to 16,000 feet the highest peaks between the Andes and the Himalayas of topham gleams a natural wonder magnificent glaciers spawned by the ice age some 15,000 years ago only five degrees south of the Equator just below these glaciers lies a wonder of man two gigantic mines called Grossberg and Ernst Berg less than two miles apart and nearly 14,000 feet high [Applause] before it's exhausted this mega mine may yield more gold than the entire California Gold Rush many call it the most spectacular mineral deposit ever found it's a mountain of ore but it's not just that it's also a root of ore so like if you had a tooth you know and and you can see the part that sticks above the gum that that's what most people mind but if you extracted that tooth and it's got that long root on it we've got that as well and it's also full of oil so you're looking at a vertical mile of gold ore body it's just incredible Grossberg and it's Berg lies some 700 miles north of Australia and 2,000 miles east of Indonesia's capital Jakarta in the western half of New Guinea second largest island in the world once a Dutch colony Irian Jaya is now an Indonesian province and home of some of the world's richest deposits of copper and gold but Irian Jaya is not surrendering its treasures without a fight the Grossberg Hertzberg mining complex took 20 years to build cost more than three billion dollars and took its toll in human life at it's dizzying altitudes men must work 24 hours a day seven days a week to make mining profitable in one of the most remote locations on earth the tough part about this was is that Mother Nature implanted this wonderful ore body at 13,000 feet when she said come get it and we had to go get it when you go up there to try to explain it to somebody the best way is that you're gonna walk away with your mouth open you're gonna be a god people are going to say how in the world did you do that this incredible story begins with one man a Dutch geologist named jean-jacques dozy in 1993 aged 84 he returned to visit the mine his courage made possible in 1936 27 year-old dozy vowed to be the first man to reach Irian Jaya as tropical glaciers it seemed a reckless boast Europeans had been launching expeditions to Aryan Jaya's hinterland for 300 years none had broken through the deadly labyrinth of jungle between the mountains and the sea the only way to make your way inland is by River the problem with the rivers is that you don't know whether rivers are leading this was a problem with the very first expeditions that came to this area that tried to eat the glaciers that took the wrong river they spent a year and a half trying to get to the glacier just because it took the wrong River it seemed unlikely the dosey would succeed where so many others had failed but those he possessed a recent 20th century invention which lifted him over the jungle and showed him the way to go dozy had the advantage of knowing what the terrain looked like from the air once you knew the terrain once you know which river to take once you knew what the lay of the land fairly well you could move a lot faster on October 29th 1936 dozy two friends and eight porters started up the I quar ever they paddled to where the mountains began and started walking we just walked up as far as we could started cutting follow the trail made a trail and the higher we came the more tougher it became after a while they didn't know where they were anymore because they had aerial photographs up to a point but then the jungle gets pretty steep and you're not quite sure how far you have to go exhausted as he was the geologist dozy took time to sketch a peculiar rock formation you had a blackish black rock wall a black mountain-- with green and blue large specs on it and well being a geologist of course recognized that there should be some copper interest into that rock but at that moment had to go on dozy had no way of knowing how right he was in fact he had stumbled upon one of the greatest geological discoveries of all time three million years ago a series of volcanic eruptions injected riches into the mountains of hearing and Jaya the erupting volcanoes opened up cracks deep within the earth propelled by hot gases molten magma from the Earth's core flowed into these fissures carrying with it unusually high concentrations of copper and gold one of them was jean-jacques dozy strange black mountain the biggest copper deposit ever discovered above the surface of the earth Dozie collected a few ore samples from the curious copper mountain on his field maps he named it Hertzberg dutch for mountain of or back in Holland he wrote a report describing his discovery but his timing could not have been worse dozie published his report in the summer of 1939 on September 3rd world war two began [Music] while Holland suffered under Nazi occupation the Earth's Berg report gathered dust 20 years later a Dutch geologist gave it to Forbes Wilson Wilson was chief mining engineer for Freeport an American mining company Forbes was a man who had to be the best or the biggest or the fastest or the smartest with anything and everything and indeed he was they had many areas that's part of the reason I think that we today are mining in complex Wilson was looking for nickel deposits but when he ran doozies description of the Ertz burg he forgot all about nickel after Forbes Wilson who read the dozy report and it became part of his being we can almost say that it became a holy grail for him he was a man fifty years old at the time and a heavy smoker he gave up smoking got himself in shape and organized this expedition he had to find for and see for himself Earth's Berg on May 30th 1960 Forbes Wilson plunged into the jungle determined to reach the Earth's Berg he asked his friend and fellow geologist Delos Flint to come along Flint jumped at the chance to take part in the adventure of a lifetime despite the perils of trekking he threw Irian Jaya the worst thing there were the leeches and if you looked at a bush they'll eat you be there trying to find something warm that he could attach to we'd always get a few and one time I found one of the roof of my mouth if I hadn't been busy talking I guess I wouldn't have had it happen but leeches weren't the only unfriendly locals only one year after the Forbes Wilson expedition the Explorer Michael Rockefeller vanished in Irian Jaya some believe the son of Governor Nelson Rockefeller drowned or was killed by sharks but others are convinced he was eaten by cannibals when dill Flint and Forbes Wilson first encountered Aryans indigenous peoples they felt threatened but for a different reason even though you've seen pictures of them with their gourds covering their privates the first time you see it it's a real shock you feel very well unequipped that's why I put it I came in with all their finery and charge like they were being arrayed in war which said I gave you but he they turned it into a dance and everybody was happy On June 16th 1960 after 18 days of hard travel Dell Flint and Forbes Wilson found the Earth's Berg [Music] a surface inspection convinced them that it was indeed a mineralogical marvel thickly laced with enormous chunks of the yellow copper ore known as chalcopyrite there'd be blobs that up to four feet across or perhaps even longer that were solid chalcopyrite and when you saw that it was just your boggle your mind you when I first got there and got up on the thing I just screamed like Tarzan and Yahoo got him my all mine the two American geologists had proved that Earth's Berg was really a mountain of ore but jean-jacques dosey had called it a mountain of war on the moon who could build a mind in one of the most inaccessible places on earth in the 1960s eerie and joyous mountain of copper and gold appeared as spectacular as Forbes Wilson believed it would be [Music] rock samples from Earth's Berg had one of the highest copper contents ever found yet no matter how rich it was Hertzberg was virtually impossible to reach but on April 5th 1967 with authorization from the Indonesian government Freeport decided to try to build its mind Freeport hired Bechtel a California engineering firm with a reputation for building things in places no one else could but even Bechtel engineers were stunned by Irian Jaya to even reach Earth's Berg engineers would have to build a 75 mile road through some of the toughest terrain on earth first through the labyrinth of mangrove swamps hugging the coast then through the seemingly impenetrable jungles of the lowlands and finally over mountains that rose like walls up to 16,000 feet high they had no airport no seaport and no place for helicopters to land well the first thing was to build a dock area and to put in a road well both the dock area in the mangroves and and the beginning of the road you had to drop everything down from helicopters yet to drop people down from helicopters to soft wheeze to make platforms where the choppers could land to bring in supplies they would get their people into choppers put them in a hoist with a chainsaw people would come down from the chopper with their chainsaw going now remember they're dropping down on a solid canvas of treetops so they would have to cut their way down to the floor of the jungle as the helicopter tries to hover and the master who's inside the helicopter is watching to make sure that this guy doesn't start bouncing around back and forth you can be slammed against the tree people have been killed this way as crews cleared helicopter landing sites Road building began workers came from all over the world to take on the incredible challenge among them was a young Indonesian from Sumatra named illness Hameed when I was selected to come here I was a little bit afraid because I heard there were almost no people in this place also some rumors that people in this area eight other human beings however when I shared my concern with my family they gave me their support and told them to leave my faith to God engineers dreads tons of gravel from riverbeds trying to create the foundation of a road in the worst places it took as much as 50 cubic yards of gravel to build one foot of road overnight while the road builders slept the road they had built the day before often sank into the swamp in places Bechtel built two miles of road for every mile that survived working in this place was very difficult I thought that after digging mud for 3 to 6 feet I would get to hard soil but in fact we were still finding mud after we had dug more than 30 feet in one day we could make only 15 to 20 feet of road as the road inched forward landslides buried tractors trucks fell into rivers helicopters sank into swamps and that was the easy part 50 miles from the coast the sheer wall of Aryans backbone rose up as steep as 70 degrees the mountaintops were razor-sharp ridges in places only two feet wide with vertical drops on either side yet 25 miles of road had to be built over those mountains if Hertzberg was to be reached if you're willing to put enough s-curves into the road you can put a road up almost any slope then the problem is to put the road along the rich grass now what the Bechtel did is from helicopters it dropped down very small bulldozers both others that are the size of small lawnmowers they will drop these down and these bulldozers would cut off the top part of the ridgeback and then slightly larger bulldozers would come in bethel went through six sized bulldozers between these very small lawnmower Thai bulldozers until they got to the big boys the size of a house which eventually did build the road so you started getting a flat Ridgeline and then you started going down in s-curves going down to the bottom tremendously difficult bulldozers would fall over the edge who knows where they ended up the bulldozers pushed forward drivers kept one eye on the dizzying drops below them and the other on the crumbling cliffs above no one knew if he would live or die sorry Lulu Barra one day my bulldozer broke down and the helicopter could not bring a spare part the next morning my friend an American whose bulldozer was working replaced me as the leader of the work after only half an hour the land he was working on collapsed and his bulldozer slid down into a canyon as he fell a tree branch speared him right through the chest and killed him by 1971 after nearly four years victory seemed in sight [Music] but seven miles short of Earth's Berg the road builders ran into a towering 2,000 foot cliff [Music] rectals engineers had an ingenious solution a helicopter carried a 9000 foot long nylon rope to a platform at the future mine with this bolted in place workers hoist it up ever thicker ropes until the line was strong enough to hold steel cables as thick as a man's on this web of Steel became the longest aerial tramway of its day and one of the steepest it's cars rose 2,000 feet in less than a mile but no one anticipated the mysterious vibrations that shook its cables vibrations would be so strong they had to stop everything because the aura cars would vibrate right off the cable they call in a Swiss mathematician he said these cables are like the strings and a very fine violin if they're bit out of tune the violin sounds lousy he recalculated speeds and stresses since then everything has gone very smoothly [Music] with the tram in place Freeport could lift men and equipment all the way to the mine entrance at the tramways Base Bechtel built mine offices and an ore processing mill after five years of battling Irian Jaya the Ertz burg mine was ready for operation at a cost of over a billion dollars but engineers had to solve another problem how were they going to get thousands of tons of ore down the mountain [Music] by 1972 engineers had met the challenge of building a road through Irian Jaya miners could begin digging the huge deposits of copper and gold discovered there soon they were mining thousands of tonnes of ore per day but they also faced a new challenge how to ship that ore from hearing and Jaya's faraway mountains to the rest of the world trucks and trams couldn't carry enough ore per day to make hertzberg profitable engineers came up with a simple solution to moving the or let it fall newly mined or begins its journey to the world through a series of or passes these giant chutes send it plummeting 2,000 feet to the base of the tram as the or hits the ground it breaks into smaller pieces making it easier to move conveyor belts rush the fallen or to a mill inside the mill it pours into the world's largest or crushers cell nearly 40 feet in diameter whirling inside these enormous drums thousands of steel balls attack the or grinding it into smaller rocks and finally into a powder at the mill workers mix powdered or with water to create a concentrated liquid slurry of copper and gold but this concentrate is still ten thousand feet high and 70 miles from the sea gravity gets it their mill workers pump the concentrate into a pipeline running beside the road after 20 miles the descent becomes so steep that gravity alone carries the concentrate another 50 miles to the sea piled in barns by the ocean awaiting shipment to smelters around the world the product of hundreds of millions of dollars and years of hazardous work looks like nothing but a huge pile of dirt but in fact it's pay dirt when it's melted each ton yields nearly 700 pounds of copper 30 grams of gold and another 30 grams of silver we mine the ore at 14,000 feet and we sell it at sea level and that's a 75 mile distance between those two nobody else does that in December 1972 the first ship loaded with ore from the Earth's Berg mine sailed from Harry and Jonah by the 1980s Hertzberg was a huge open-pit mine [Music] the ancient glacial meadow sketched by jean-jacques dozy echoed with the sounds of one of the world's most ambitious mining operations but Freeport knew that big as it was Hertzberg wouldn't last forever the company sent geologists deep into the surrounding mountains to search for an even bigger body of war a mother lode that would make lining and Irian Jaya profitable long after Earth's Berg had played out it was a dirty dangerous thrilling job for a few exceptional men and one exceptional woman we spent many times really running for the helicopter you'd be just exhausted and you just get in and almost collapse but it was either that or spend the night and it was very cold up there at night in the early 1970s Frank Nelson was one of the first geologists to explore the wilds of Irian Jaya working with him was his wife Eleanor also a geologist our first chore really was developing on that first topographic and at the same time geologic we had one camera that we mounted below the helicopter that Frank would work on a remote control and I took handheld pictures out then with the door of the helicopter just open the door and point the camera out and sort of surprise our drill is some time they take who and hell is that then only be sitting out the edge of the sea with the feet over the edge and shooting straight down and trying to get a montage mosaic of the area and even there's big rough tough Maori drillers they were impressed by that that is one cool woman people were not familiar with the natives and we were lucky enough to have more direct day-by-day contact with them and you got to really like them a lot of people feared them they look pretty dramatic to me with painted faces and you know bones in the nose and bows and arrows and they were you know hominis looking but actually when you got to know them they had a great sense of humor we just asked them for the fun of it and they always would say well not us but over in the other Canyon those fellows yeah they muck you know they eat people and they go over there so not us but those those fellas has by the 1980s the Earth's Berg open pit mine was no longer profitable and was shut down but by then Frank and Ellen are Nelson and other geologists had discovered huge underground copper deposits nearby it was a rich find but it wasn't the mother lode freeport have been searching for in fact in the mid 1980s Freeport almost quit mining in arian Jaya as a new technology threatened to destroy the world demand for copper fiber optic cable was revolutionising world telephone systems many believe it would soon make copper telephone wire obsolete but in 1984 a new chief executive took over at Freeport James Robert Moffitt was a field geologist who'd spent years exploring for oil and minerals he wasn't ready to give up on Aryan Jaya he believed in the mother lode I looked at New Guinea and saw Papua New Guinea with hundreds of minds that had been explored over the last 150 years and here in Jaya with basically the small arts bird mine and it's what we call state line geology it happens all the time just because this terrain was so horrible in terms of trying to explore it and people quit at the Papua New Guinea border and they begin to tell himself that this State Line really was some sort of a geologic boundary well that's ridiculous geology doesn't know political boundaries and it never has and it never will Muffit was convinced there was more gold in here and Jaya's primeval hills he told his geologists to find it as it happened a Freeport geologist in Irian Jaya had been thinking about gold and staring at a mountain called Grossberg less than two miles from the Earth's Berg mine every morning I'd look up and I'd see the outcrop I'd see that mountain sitting up there and I think to myself gee there really should be something up there it literally drove me nuts to stand down at the bottom of that mountain and look up at it and know that there was a rock up there that I hadn't been on and that was an itch that I just had to scratch and after about two years we finally got a chance to do it the rocks Dave Potter collected on Grossberg assayed at one to two grams of gold per ton it was enough to justify further investigation Potter setup diamond drills and took core samples the first one came back which was an angle hole that went directly under the outcrop and not only did it have gold in it it also had copper values and for the first time I started thinking to myself there's something more here than just a gold deposit the one that really drove at home was a third the last hole that we drilled it went over 1500 feet deep and out of that 1,500 feet all of it but about 90 to a hundred feet came back with copper values that were or grade in other words they were on the order of one to two percent copper on the order of one to as high as five grams per tonne gold that hole was when I suddenly felt my god this is big big was an understatement Grossberg made mining history Dave potter's hunch led Freeport to a billion tons of ore the biggest gold deposit and the third biggest copper deposit ever found give mr. Moffatt the credit for maintaining the property when he could have taken probably 75 million dollars for it and in the early 80s and walked away clean you know now grass Berg itself in the ground is worth over 40 billion dollars 75 million 40 billion good choice but as the first euphoria faded a sobering realization took over a wall of cliffs blocked the Earth's Berg Road from reaching the grass Berg to mine it's Bonanza Freeport would have to halt the world's biggest trucks and shovels up eariy enjoy as nearly vertical cliffs to a mountain even more remote than Hertzberg at Earth's Berg engineers had achieved the incredibly difficult now at Grossberg they faced the impossible [Music] Grossberg is the world's richest gold mine it's also one of the most productive and cost-efficient working 24 hours a day seven days a week it's miners dig 600,000 tonnes of ore in a single day to dig this staggering amount of war they must use the world's biggest mining equipment gigantic boo cyrus electric shovels picking up a me tons of war in a single scoop and the Komatsu 930 the leviathan of or trucks carrying over 300 tons in a single load other Minds use this colossal equipment but none has faced the task of transporting it up sheer cliffs in a remote and primitive land to a mountain peak nearly 14,000 feet high in the 1980s this seemed impossible the Earth's Berg tramway can carry only 15 tons a single Komatsu or truck weighs over 200 tons towering cliffs blocked the Earth's Berg road from reaching the Grossberg site in the late 1980s the Grossberg miners faced this daunting challenge and won this is the heat road he stands for heavy equipment access trail the heat road is unlike any other highway ever built [Music] the hero begins at an elevation of about 8,000 feet and traverses up the mountainside for about seven miles and comes out at about 13,500 feet some of the grades are an excess of 22 to 30 percent branching off from the main road just below the grass Berg the heat road zigzags straight uphill into the clouds until it reaches the mine Freeport's stairway to heaven the largest single contributing factor to this mine is the heat road if we didn't have the heat road grass Berg mine would not today be moving six hundred thousand tons a day over this nightmare of a road colossal trucks and shovels must be brought up piece by piece like this or truck chassis weighing 40 tons in places the road seems to defy the laws of physics as its grades approach the maximum angle of fully loaded vehicle can climb the hero shouldn't exist if you look at the heat from down below you don't even know what it is when I bring people up for their first visit they look and they just say what is that what's going on up there many said this crucial Road could not be built or if it could its cost would be astronomical they hadn't counted on Freeport's veteran road builder Ilyas Hameed Freeport asked several independent contractors from Australia to give them an estimate as to what it would cost to build a road and the estimates came in and dozens and dozens of millions of dollars he heard about these incredible estimates and he thought to himself this is crazy I can do this for a lot less money than what these people are asking so his expert supervisor agreed to let him try fire poor Tama first my boss took me to see the situation from the helicopter I told him I needed a bulldozer mechanics my boss said okay yes I give you everything you need so the guy just drove his bulldozer from the top to the bottom it took him a while he didn't do it overnight but he just zigzag back and forth it was the hardest work I have ever done the bulldozer was always in danger of falling because the ground was very slippery and had very little soil on top so the challenge is very big when you drive the bulldozer on a slope as steep as the slope going up to grass Berg you can go over any time he almost did several times his nerve endings are so much better than ours in sensing that fine line between toppling over in your bulldozer and dying and being able to make that cut on which other people can follow behind you that road was built for under two million dollars incredible just because of one guy who had whatever it took brave enough to go and drive his bulldozer from the top to the bottom he's kind of a mellow guy but inside I think he's he's a tiger and he loves the challenge and he made something amazing happen he maybe doesn't know much about the world of physics maybe he just says you want a road from A to B and I'll get you there the he'd road conquered Erie and giant mountains but steepness is not the only obstacle to be overcome at nearly 14,000 feet operating one of the world's biggest mines is a daily dangerous challenge most mornings begin in brilliant sunshine but by midday clouds sweep in from the sea within seconds visibility at Grossberg can drop from nearly perfect to nearly zero most days the Grossberg miners must operate their Leviathan machinery and fog so dense that can barely see the 200-ton Komatsu or trucks with their tires as tall as a house could squash a smaller vehicle flat without stopping now they've got very strict rules about what to do once a fog comes in having your lights on being X number of metres away from any other truck who has priority and these safety measures are followed extremely closely otherwise people would be dying all over the place or truck drivers like Alexander crumb sein have been trained to handle dangerous weather jaredwall ulu matter if the fog is closer than 50 feet I park my truck and wait until it disappears I'm never frightened although I worry a bit because the road is very narrow and slippery like many cross Berg employees Alexander Crum Seon is an indigenous area knees his truck driving skills are even more impressive than they seem that is a voluminous I add I had never operated a vehicle before the company attested me when I came on the first day of training I was a little confused but they did not find it difficult after that 20% of my people are local area new local people who have never seen a toyota before or a car and they come up and they're driving 310 haul trucks that that's a challenge in itself and we're pretty proud of our workforce and I've I've worked at numerous mines and I put my people up against any other mines in the world brass Birds miners won't be stopping work anytime soon geologists believe the deposit is even bigger than originally estimated and may still contain billions of tons of ore but Freeport has not given up its quest for new bonanzas of copper and gold the search has sent geologists on death-defying explorations today the Grossberg mine remains the biggest gold deposit ever found freeport geologists continue their search for an even bigger one today's scientists have tools unimaginative the past they pour over magnetic imagery and high-resolution satellite photography zeroing in on potential or bodies they call hot spots without leaving the comfort and safety of their land but someone's got to evaluate those hotspots and the only way to do that is the old-fashioned way [Music] J Penningtons morning commute is a little different from most we just pop out of the helicopter basically two at a time with a sampling pack in a in a survival pack and then we're one at a time down the hoist say from one hundred hundred and twenty feet like a 12 story building the first time I was lowered out of a helicopter it was it was a extremely invigorating and it was scary and it was fun and all at the same time you got to have ultimate faith in your pilot the hoist master who's gonna have your life on the line there for about 90 seconds and then the people that maintain the equipment both the hoist and the helicopter so you get through that and let's face it you can't do the work without that confidence as soon as you have that the rest of it can be as fun as you want [Music] exploration geologists like Jay Pennington on the front line of Freeport search for the next Grossberg that's good stuff despite all the high-tech science that leads him to a hot spot Jay works with tools any California 49er would recognize eight hours a day he pans for gold like an Old West prospector in some of the last true wilderness on earth a lot of the times when you hit the ground you got a feel that no western or no non native has ever been where you are at that moment right there so you have the potential to stumble over a 50 ounce noggin of gold and just as easily as you can step on a a rare poisonous snake when Jade finish assembling one hotspot he radios for the helicopter to pick him up and take him to another one but when a helicopter leaves Jay in the jungle there's no guarantee it can return can't fly if you can't see we don't play a mountain tag by the helicopter it's not advisable there have been times when you wind up in a in a sandwich of clouds okay either one can get you from the top down or from the bottom up and if you get a helicopter stuck in that sandwich you're asking for real trouble and then I'm there for the night and that's happening a lot when you're stuck out there it's miserable beyond all the adventure lies the ultimate dream an ore body even bigger than Grossberg in 1994 a Canadian exploration company claimed to have found it Bree axe announced it had unearthed an enormous gold deposit on the neighboring island of Borneo how enormous 200 million ounces of gold worth 70 billion dollars as bre-x stock skyrocketed the Indonesian government asked Freeport to develop the Borneo bonanza but when Freeport geologists finally got a chance to test bre-x ore samples they made a shocking discovery what they were finding was particles of gold in that rock powder that were 10 20 50 times the size of the rest of the powder so they were obviously salted the gold that we found in our samples that we had drilled and and processed a few grains ago we did find were very small meniscal compared to what they what they found and i just told us that somebody had falsified the information by adding gold to the samples the bre-x gold strike was a hoax Freeport executives asked Michael did Guzman Bri axes chief geologist to meet with them and explain the falsified or samples it was d-day right there that was when Steve was gonna make the first confrontation and say hey guys I know what gives here we we don't think here on the level and he never turned up for the meeting and never turned up after that anywhere we had had a message from Jakarta coming in where they had heard that that the Guzman have disappeared out of a helicopter and he was the only person in the backseat of the helicopter and supposedly opened the door and jumped out Indonesian authorities claimed to have found a Guzman's body and ruled his death a suicide but some believe the case is not closed the whole thing about his remains and how they were identified it's all very questionable I kind of feel like he's probably hanging out in the Philippines somewhere enjoying his money despite the bre-x hoax Freeport continues looking for another grass Berg a geological Holy Grail hidden in the mountains of Irian Jaya [Music] like true Grail seekers those who have braved the quest have been transformed the country itself is so spectacularly beautiful that you well I always said he was a religious experience to go to work in the morning because the Sun was just hitting the tops of the peaks and it was uh it was just a wonderful place some of the things that I'm gonna remember for the rest of my life and things that I have a hard time talking to other people about are things like being in a helicopter at 18,000 feet at 6 o'clock in the morning and watching the Sun Rise over that mountain it's magic it's just it's unbelievable when we were finally leaving for the last time Ellie and I were in the helicopter and you can hear this movement from the whole mob in native skin running down the wall trotting out all dressed up in their finery saying well you'll be back I think we couldn't look at each other both choked up on the way down knowing those are one of the best parts your life is finished I think the men who build this mind I think a really an unusual Bunch from the standpoint that not only were their hard work is you can find hard workers almost anywhere in the world I think it was a vision a vision that they had which I think was inspired by the kind of terrain they were working in no place has a physical toughness and splendor that Aryan has it was really a challenge men against nature but nature at her most unforgiving nature and the toughest I don't think you can find any place on earth when nature is any tougher than this Grossberg and Earth's Berg will forever remain monuments to those who discovered them built them and made them work a tribute to the human courage and determination that against depend Assad's erected a superstructure above the clouds at the ends of the earth [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 3,092,790

Rating: 4.621973 out of 5

Keywords: grasberg mine documentary, grasberg mine, gold mining documentary, grasberg mine pollution, grasberg mine papua, largest gold mine in the world, new guinea, mining, gold, gold mine, gold mining, papua, gold (chemical element), largest gold mine, Science, Technology, Engineering, science documentary, grasberg mine depth, science photography, science explained, Spark, science experiment

Id: UrAVuOOlW5Y

Length: 51min 41sec (3101 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019