Please wait while one of the largest mobile machines in the world crosses the road.
The machine pictured above is a bucket-wheel excavator used in modern surface mining. Machines like this have given humanity the ability to mine minerals and change the face of planet Earth in new and dramatic ways. Some open pit mines, for example, are visible from orbit. The largest excavators are over 200 meters long and 100 meters high, now dwarfing the huge NASA Crawler that transports space shuttles to the launch pads. Bucket-wheel excavators can dig a hole the length of a football field to over 25 meters deep in a single day. They may take a while to cross a road, though, with a top speed under one kilometer per hour.
via apod
How hard would it have been to mention “where: this machine was located as even even the country? Wanna be reporters, should at least include a few actual facts in their articles. I assume Peru but not actually sure.
There are many of them in operation digging up brown coal in an open pit mine just outside of Dusseldorf Germany. I took pictures in that mine 18 years ago. I counted eleven of them in a mine that was several square miles in size. They all feed to a common conveyor system that runs across the mine’s floor, feeding to a tipple which loads a continuous stream of unit trains driven by electric locomotives that end up in a very large fossil fueled power plant. It was quite awesome.