1720m down

Worn has been really slow this week but they did ok me to go down the nine with the nine geologist on his daily tasks.

It's about a half about drive at 20-30kph so about 10km down the decline. There are over a hundred km of tunnels, most of which you can drive a truck down, but we just went directly to the bottom.

At the bottom of the mine we were 1720m below the surface and 1350m below sea level (for comparison Ben Nevis is 1345m in elevation above sea level).

It's quite humid and often hot down there, moisture seeps from the walls and they have incredibly powerful fans that pump air down from the surface, when the surface is 40+ degrees Celsius then as you can imagine it would get pretty unbearable down there.

Standing at the new face you can hear the rock cracking and popping as it expands due to the pressure changes that come from excavating a tunnel at depth. But every tunnel in this mine is designed to stay open for decades, so it's safe. Some of the tunnels we drove down were 20 years old, and the mine has been there in some form or other since 1895.