Welcome to 'Minegolia,' the last frontier

After a 16-hour drive under the piercing blue skies of Mongolia's southern Gobi, the first view of the world's newest mega-mine looks eerily like a desert aflame. Black clouds of dust billow up above the horizon from the pit at Tavan Tolgoi, where a swarm of bulldozers and mechanical diggers has clawed a 70m-deep gash into the yellow hills. This resource — thought to be the biggest deposit of coking coal on the planet — is chewed out and transported away to China by a seemingly endless line of trucks that rumble across the plains in a convoy of dust.

Read Full Story>>