Original subtitles

In the most remote parts of the world,

steel giants roam in search of treasure

unearthed by rock-shattering blasts.

- Fire in the hole.

One of the biggest shovels ever built

devours hundreds of tons of ore.

They look like big toys,

but they're very dangerous.

Trucks the size of houses

rumble through forbidding landscapes,

hauling precious cargo.

You see the size of it, right?

Most people never get to see this.

And vast crushers chew up an unending flow of rock...

All to create the prize

that people have been chasing for centuries: gold.

Gold. It's one of the most precious metals on Earth,

but how is it pulled from the depths of its rocky tombs?

It starts with raw power,

vast amounts of hard rock,

and the mechanical muscle of giant shovels

that is rivaled only by the gods.

Yet before they can get digging,

these miners have to ignite their search for gold

in an explosive way.

Not like the good old days. There's no more TNT

and the plunger like you used to see on Bugs Bunny.

That's not it anymore.

The good old days of mining weren't good.

They were brutal...

- ...laborious...

...and unbelievably dangerous.

For thousands of years,

humans have pried metal from the earth

by using their bare hands and heat.

The Roman and the Greek, the Bronze Age brought fire

and brought the beginning of using metal

for different purpose.

Metal tools like pickaxes, shovels, and hammers

allowed a leap forward in mining technology,

but it was still backbreaking work,

often done by enslaved people or prisoners.

The work got easier but no less dangerous

with the use of black powder,

the first explosive.

Explosive was a game-changer in mining.

- Break the rock...

...to get metals out, including gold.

In the 17th century,

black powder could crack rocks,

but the results were unpredictable and often deadly.

Today, at Agnico Eagle's Detour Lake mine

in northern Ontario,

the blasting used in their 900-foot-deep open pit mine

is much more controlled and sophisticated.

So, we use an emulsion-based product for this.

Emulsion is, like, a gel-based blast explosive.

That's batched up at our processing plant

that we have here. Then we bring it down in the bulk trucks.

They're these big loading units.

They hold about 18,500 kilograms.

Emulsion-based explosives

are the gold standard for mining.

The explosive agent is suspended in oil

and is enormously powerful and extremely stable...

And I'll stand close.

...until it's set off with an electronic detonator

that can be timed down to the microsecond

and is enormously powerful.

The blast is designed to pull off the wall,

so when we blast,

we want to make sure that it's as flat as possible,

because you don't want any loose material

that could potentially come down

and harm somebody that's working there.

Once the blast pattern is finalized,

that's when the boreholes are packed with emulsion.

That's crushed rock that we put on top.

We put that on top of the emulsion.

It compresses the emulsion down

so the energy doesn't release upwards.

It releases outwards, which causes your breakage

to get your fragmentation like this rock that you see here.

It's a multistep process

that keeps the blast crew safe

and gets the hard rock ready for the shovels.

Take the detonator that goes into the booster.

It goes in, like, here, and it locks.

The detonator itself,

it'll initiate the booster.

The booster will initiate the emulsion,

and that initiates the blast.

Matt, pit's been swept. Pit's clear.

Ten-four. Thank you, Vince.

Mark all debts counted for.

Ready to fire.

Three, two, one.

Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole.

Fire in the hole.

A million tons of rock

is blasted free from the shackles of the earth,

shattered into pieces that are the right size for the machines.

We need to plan the explosive in a pattern

that facilitate the breaking of the rock,

and you don't want to end up

with a piece of rock that is 10 ton big.

What you want is to have a rock that is easy to manipulate,

that can easily go into the shovel,

into the truck.

You may not be able to get blood from a stone,

but with the ore free,

it's time for the shovels to start going for the gold.

We move over 300,000 tons

of material in a day.

We wouldn't be able to do this without all the machines.

The Caterpillar 6060

and the Caterpillar 7495 rope shovel

work in unison at the Detour Lake mine...

Relentlessly scooping the ore up

and feeding the endless parade of haul trucks

that run 24 hours a day,

seven days a week,

365 days a year.

These are big machines.

They are dangerous, and, like,

you have people all around you.

We all need each other in this line of work.

We're a very, very close crew.

If I'm not here,

I can't load the trucks.

The trucks can't go to the crusher.

It's like, you feel like you have a purpose.

I run excavators.

I was on the trucks.

I also ran loaders and dozers.

I've ran all kinds of different types of machines.

But the Cat 6060 mining shovel

is bigger and badder than any of those other machines.

Really big. We're talking 30 feet tall.

1.3 million lbs.

This is just a monster.

It's very big.

Sometimes, because we're in such a big place,

we don't really see how big it is.

Here I am, running the second biggest shovel here.

Now, like, I'm here,

and I'm the first woman on a 6060.

It's cool.

The Cat 6060 is built for power.

It propels toward its assigned spot,

where it scoops up 67 tons of ore

with every bucket it fills.

So, now, I will call in some trucks.

- Go ahead.

I'm loading the 400-ton trucks,

which are, like, the biggest trucks.

- Ten-four.

So, right now, my face

is a couple different types of materials--

high-grade ore,

low-grade ore,

and waste material.

So, all the stuff that I'll be loading out right now,

since I am in the high grade,

it's going to go directly in the crusher.

But even high-grade ore

contains a relatively small amount of gold,

anything above 0.02 ounces per ton.

We don't find high-grade gold deposit anymore.

The average grade is going down.

You need to mine with bigger truck

and bigger machinery,

because size matter.

In the 19th century,

there were rich deposits of gold all over the world.

When they were discovered,

they caused a series of gold rushes that reshaped the world.

In that era, miners were digging up gold nuggets,

virtually pure chunks of gold.

The discovery of gold in California

kicked off the first big gold rush in 1848.

After that, floods of prospectors

raced to Australia in 1851,

and the Klondike in 1896.

Gold rushes brought thousands of people to remote regions.

Towns sprung up, businesses boomed,

and new infrastructure was built virtually overnight.

When you find a gold deposit,

you basically will scale your equipment

on the deposit you found.

Nineteenth-century miners could dig up

these rich deposits with just pickaxes and shovels,

but those deposits were quickly mined out.

12 million ounces of gold,

more than 400 tons were extracted in five years

in California alone.

It's gold!

The richest deposits of gold

were depleted by the end of the 1800s.

Yet annual global yields of gold continue to rise.

It's basically the result

of our advancing technology.

The more Caterpillar and Komatsu and all those company

could build bigger truck and bigger shovel,

the more we could do.

Size matters in the gold mine.

Each one of the 6060's bucketfuls of ore

has about 2 ounces of gold.

This shovel, since this is a front shovel,

I am pushing to fill the bucket.

When you're using a shovel,

you want to push forward, right?

It's the same with a hydraulic mining shovel.

If you want to move a lot of rock

with as much force as you can,

you want to push forward.

So, my truck is here.

We're going to start loading him.

Operating over the haul trucks

is a precise operation.

The heavy weight of the ore,

if dropped incorrectly,

can cause major damage to the multimillion-dollar haul trucks

or even injuries to the people driving them.

They look like big toys,

but they're very dangerous.

You really got to be on your A game every single day.

A rock could fall on the truck.

A rock could fall on me.

Rocks are a big problem.

I need to be very gentle.

That's why I'm trying never to touch the truck.

It can really rough them up.

Nonstop work in this punishing environment

takes a toll, even on a machine

built as tough as these shovels.

Scooping thousands of tons of rock daily,

the bucket takes a beating.

That's why it takes a full-service repair shop

to keep these machines running.

Welding, hydraulics, electrical.

The technicians at Detour Lake

keep some of the biggest machines in the world

digging up ore.

The rock is very, very abrasive.

Our operators are really skilled,

but with that being said,

we do have a very high wear rate, our attachments,

just due to the rock hardness,

so we do have to maintain it.

Well, the shovel is the working part of the machine.

It's the part that wears out the fastest.

To replace these shovels,

you're looking at between $2 million and $3 million.

So each shovel is equipped with a wear package

that is designed to take the brunt of the punishment

while being easy to change out.

I got to cut off all these wear strips here

and then after that,

clean everything up.

Because the rocks are so abrasive

that after a couple months,

it wears right down to nothing,

and if we don't fix it,

it'll be full of holes.

Setting up a gouger here.

It's got electricity and air,

and whenever I touch it off here,

it melts the metal, and the air blows it away.

In general, preventative maintenance is made

in order to proactively keep your vehicle

in optimal driving condition,

and that helps you prolong the life of your vehicle.

Once I cut the seam on this side and the top side,

it'll just fall off.

Sorry, buddy.

As fast as we get one fixed,

there's another one back in the shop.

Preventative maintenance keeps the fleet

in top shape to traverse some of the world's toughest terrain.

When these shovels are working in the pit,

they have to keep an unbroken flow of ore coming up that hill,

so they've developed

a streamlined communications system

- to keep things moving.

We actually have a honk system.

One honk, and he's off.

Sometimes, the most effective way to communicate

is the simplest.

Two honks

means "back up a little more."

Three honks means reposition.

When I'm done loading,

one honk means go.

The 6060 is huge.

But it looks puny

next to the towering Cat 7495,

a rope shovel behemoth.

You see the size of it, right?

Most people never get to see this.

The size and power of today's mining shovels

have pushed the limits of what is possible

in the gold mining industry.

If we think about some of these machines

that can do massive construction work,

like move a lot of earth around,

the machines push what we're able to do,

but they also push what we even think about doing.

It's almost like yesterday's magic

becomes today's commonplace or today's normal.

The Cat 7495 may be normal for the mining industry,

but there's nothing commonplace about it.

It's a massive digger than uses a series of cables or ropes

that pull the ore into the bucket.

Rope shovels have even higher capacities

than their hydraulic counterparts.

There's more power on the electric rope shovel

because they can install a massive electric motor

and it can pack a lot more power

on the back half of the electric rope shovel

than it can on a front end of a hydraulic mining shovel.

The 7495 rope shovel is 45 feet tall,

a full 15 feet taller than the 6060.

Its bucket is almost twice as big,

and it has a much longer working life than a hydraulic shovel.

An electric rope shovel uses a winch system

and a steel wire rope to lift up the bucket

while it's excavating the rock.

A hydraulic shovel would use a hydraulic piston

to push the bucket into the rock face and then scoop it up.

This here is my steering.

Just going to walk it to the face.

Under the command of a skilled operator,

this shovel can scoop up 120 tons of material

in a single bucket.

It would take 11,000 dudes with wheelbarrows

to do what this machine does in one scoop.

You know, you can put a pickup truck

in the bucket of one of those rope shovel,

a full pickup truck.

It's not like a regular excavator

where you could work the bucket.

This here just hoists

and push with your crowd, right?

So, that's the way you fill it.

The electric rope shovel has four basic operations.

There's the hoisting operation

to actually lift the bucket up with the ore up

so you can load it onto the truck.

There's a crowd function

that pushes the dipper in and out.

So, it moves in a motion

like your hand scraping the rock face,

and then there's the swing stage

where you're swinging the bucket around

to load it on the truck, usually on the side.

And then there's the propel motion

that moves the tracks back and forth

to get into position up against the rock face.

This colossus runs on electric power,

so it runs cleaner than a diesel machine,

and its electric motor system is simple,

yet engineered to keep on working for decades

in the most extreme mining conditions.

Inside the high-strength steel structure,

a powerful electric hoist motor gives this mammoth shovel

up to 4,900 horsepower for gobbling up ore.

This gives the digger a bigger payload capacity

than hydraulic shovels.

Beyond the mechanical level,

the operator's eye-line is 34 feet above the landscape

to allow a bird's eye view of hazards in the terrain

while a wealth of controls at their fingertips

deliver detailed information

about the systems rumbling below them.

It's electric over hydraulic, right?

So, it's just plug and play.

I'm not a big video gamer,

but it is a big video game, right?

Then I'll reset my brakes,

and it'll go from travel to dig mode.

What it is is a giant dustpan.

You know what I mean?

Hand shovel. Like, it's just--

That's what it is.

For most of human history,

mining meant working in dark, damp caves

with barely any light or ventilation.

Everything was done by hand.

The earliest known mines

are about 43,000 years old.

Those miners used tools made of wood, stone, and bone.

For thousands of years,

that's what mining was,

digging with hand tools.

In some parts of the world,

like central regions in Africa or South America,

there are still miners working by hand.

In 1835,

steam power was harnessed to create the first steam shovel,

invented by a 22-year-old named William Otis.

Its bucket had a 1.4-cubic-yard payload,

and it helped build the Western Railroad in Massachusetts.

The Marion Steam Shovel Company was founded in 1884,

and their shovels were shipped all over the world,

building everything from the Panama Canal

to steelworks in the Soviet Union.

Diggers leveled up in 1904

with the invention of the dragline,

an enormous mining excavator

controlled with ropes and chains.

The largest dragline ever built was the Big Muskie,

which could heft 325 tons at a time.

These giant diggers dug the foundation

for today's mining monsters,

like the Caterpillar 7495.

Both my grandfathers were, you know,

back in the day, dragline operators,

and I got a brother. He's on a drill,

and then my son, he's here.

So, pretty proud about that.

Each humongous payload this bucket scoops up

weighs 240,000 lbs,

about the same as a blue whale,

so the trucks catching these loads have to be

every bit as mighty as the shovels that dig them up.

Mining shovels are the first responders

in the open pit.

Centuries of human ingenuity

have created these towering diggers.

Digging into the earth is a primal instinct

from children playing in sandboxes

to mines plumbing the depths for gold

and the other precious metals that power modern life.

- Dispatch, you can send

a few trucks to shovel four.

The shovels get the race for the gold started,

but the haul trucks keep it moving out of the pit.

The Caterpillar 798 haul truck

rumbles towards the shovels.

It's their job to lug tons of ore

hundreds of feet uphill...

over... and over...

and over.

So, the Cat 798

is the biggest truck in Caterpillar's fleet.

26 feet tall, 450,000 lbs.

- D'oh. We got a truck.

So, this truck is rated at 400-ton capacity.

It has 3,500 horsepower under the hood.

It's massive.

Heading downhill in a truck

that weighs half a million pounds could be nerve-wracking.

So, now, we're approaching

the top of the south ramp,

heading into the pit.

But these haulers are outfitted with an ARC system,

automatic retarder control.

So, the ARC or the automatic retarder control

is a system onboard the truck to prevent the truck's engine

from running faster than you want it to.

When the driver engages

the automatic retarder control,

the speed of the vehicle is set in a small computer

called an electronic control module.

That computer senses the weight of the payload

and the terrain it's driving on.

Then the ARC uses the kinetic energy

created from the truck's descent

and converts it to electric energy that is then used

to create resistance within the engine

to slow the truck down.

If it needs to,

the ARC can also activate the hydraulic braking system

to keep the haul truck's speed at 18.6 miles per hour.

Well, we got my ARC setting at 29.9.

It helps stop the truck from going faster than you want,

especially when you're going downhill.

So, the ARC now, it's going to hold the truck back

at that speed the whole way down,

so I can take my foot off everything

and the truck will go down by itself.

When these heavy machineries are being built,

there are redundant systems

and there are safety systems that are in place

because once these things break down and lose control,

humans are just little tiny ants to them, essentially.

They have to have a lot of trust

to get this much material dumped on them.

So, the suspension only can take so much,

and if you can be, you know, gentle,

benefits the truck, benefits the driver.

That was 90 tons he just dropped in.

In just a few minutes,

the 798's box is filled to capacity.

So, we got loaded with three and a half buckets,

and we have 363 tons.

The loaded truck begins its journey

out of the pit

as another truck moves into place

to get its share of the ore.

At Detour Lake, there are 57 haul trucks in the fleet,

and they run 24 hours a day to keep the ore flowing.

Each one of these trucks is the size of a two-storey house.

This mine needs to process a huge volume of ore every day

to make the operation pay off.

With its 23-foot-wide axles,

261-cubic-yard box, and 13-foot-tall tires,

the Cat 798 is a force to be reckoned with.

The backbone of this truck is its high-strength steel frame

and deep box section rails,

which can take the constant stress

of hundreds of tons of ore.

This truck is engineered to haul cargo continuously

for 100,000 hours.

That's 11 and a half years of nonstop work.

Open mine pits, there's sand everywhere.

There's dust.

These are multimillion-dollar machines,

and they're there to do jobs,

but the environment that they are working in is really tough.

This mine's fleet has two models of trucks,

the Cat 798 and the slightly smaller Cat 795.

They both do the same job,

hauling ore out of the pit,

and they are both regularly rotated out of service

for preventative maintenance to keep one step ahead

of the brutal operating conditions

in the mine.

As far as maintenance goes,

we have extensive high-quality employees working for us

that maintain our fleet.

In the mine's repair shops,

the maintenance team checks every system on the Cat haulers.

So, basically, I do everything that's mechanical.

So everything outside of the tires I deal with.

That's the hydraulic tank.

So, that's the tank that controls the brakes,

steering, the box.

That's the oil for the whole machine there.

Every component on this truck is oversized.

These trucks are diesel-fueled electric vehicles.

This truck, unlike your car,

doesn't have a transmission.

A diesel engine runs a generator

that produces electricity,

which powers the rear wheel motors.

This engine here is about 3,500 horsepower, roughly.

It's about 90 litres.

It's a V16, so it's 16 cylinders in a V,

kind of like how your pickups

and your muscle cars are V8s.

This one's got 16 cylinders

instead of eight cylinders, and it's just way bigger.

This engine on the ground

is almost the size of a small minivan or a big car.

And this truck hauls about 400 tons at a time,

so it's got to have a lot of power

to get 400 tons back up that hill.

Today's haulers are high tech,

but in the early days of mining,

getting the ore out of mines required innovation.

The earliest evidence of mine carts

comes from the 16th century.

An old mining book called De Re Metallica published in 1556

shows primitive mine carts,

and there are surviving carts from around that time.

Donkeys, horses, and even camels

have been used for gold mining in the past,

but it wasn't long before miners upgraded

from actual horsepower.

The direct ancestor

of the modern dump truck or haul truck

is the dump wagon or haul wagon,

which works exactly the same way but is horse-drawn.

The big moment is the First World War.

Suddenly, everybody is using trucks in the front lines

and just behind the front lines,

and a billion different specialized variety of truck

evolved for these wartime purposes.

This is also just after the first hydraulic systems

are invented and start to be popularized,

so for the first time, these are dump trucks with a push button

to lift the load in the back.

The first off-road heavy hauler

designed specifically for moving earth

was the Euclid Model 1Z in 1934.

When the Model 1Z was first invented in 1930s,

it only had 100 horsepower,

which was a lot back then,

because it's still equivalent to around 100 horses.

However, now the horsepower are in the thousands.

What that translates to--

it would be bigger, faster, and stronger.

In less than 100 years,

these first dump trucks mutated

into the hulking Caterpillar 798 and 795.

Pass behind (Unclear).

These things weigh, empty, about a half a million pounds,

and loaded, they weigh about 1.4 million pounds.

I guess the biggest reason I love it is in the cab myself,

like my own little office.

So, the 798, brand new,

about $10 million.

I'm pretty much driving a $10-million office here.

These towering trucks have to be big

to keep the refinery supplied

with a constant stream of ore.

The size of the haul truck is very important,

because you want to make sure that you're moving

enough tonnage per hour,

per day, per year

to be able to make up for the cost

of moving all of this material.

Max capacity of this truck is 435.

So, our target's about 378 tons.

We try to get between 378 and 400 tons.

A full 400-ton load

contains about 11 troy ounces of gold

riding up the mine's ramp on six massive tires.

The Cat 798 subjects its tires to unimaginable stress

24 hours a day.

A blowout would be disastrous,

so keeping them running is crucial

to the mine's operations.

What gives the Caterpillar 798

the power it needs on top of the diesel engine

is the huge tire mounted on it,

which provides it with the traction it needs

to do all the maneuvers.

The tires are the workhorses of the Cat 798

and its slightly smaller cousin the 795,

and they need regular service from the mine's tire shop.

- Hey, Rob. We're ready for 233.

Well, today, this haul truck's coming in

for a front rotation.

Integral part of the tire maintenance.

Not only do we fix damaged tires.

We also have to maintain them.

By scheduling maintenance at set intervals,

Detour Lake avoids unexpected breakdowns

and stays in control of their fleet.

So, basically, largest tire

in the entire world,

and we definitely push them to their absolute maximum.

The tires are very expensive,

about $80,000 per tire,

so, basically, what you're looking at here

is almost a half a million dollars' worth of tires.

So, its average life would probably be

somewhere between seven to 12 months,

but in that time, the tires can actually carry

in their lifetime three to four million tons.

Changing the biggest tire in the world

requires some serious brawn.

So, to just change a tire on a vehicle this size,

you need a special attachment on the end of a forklift

to grab the tire.

It's amazing.

I'm going to push the sidewall of the tire in

with the pads of my machine

so that my partners can remove

the lock ring and the O ring.

Three, two, one.

Bring her down.

Now that the hardware and the lock ring's been removed,

I'm going to remove the tire from the wheel.

These aren't ordinary tires.

They are engineered for the immense weight

of a fully-loaded haul truck with steel reinforcements

and specially-formulated rubber.

For the mining industry,

you have a huge tire.

The tire has to be huge.

You also have to increase your load capacity,

because in the mining industry,

you're going through so many huge loads.

So, with those two main differences,

you need to have reinforced tires

with heavy-duty steel bars inside,

and your tires have to have a better rubber compound.

It's about 14 feet tall.

I think they weigh 12,000 or 13,000 lbs.

Pretty big tire. Yeah.

So, now, we've inspected the tire.

We're going to mark it, and we're going to throw it out

into our spare pile.

So, after the rotated tire comes off,

the very next thing we're going to do is, we're going to grab

our new tire that we're going to start fitting

in that front fitment.

We are now going to put on the three-piece lock ring,

and this is what holds the hardware onto the wheel

so that the tire doesn't fall off.

We just have to air this up to 110 PSI,

and then it's good to go back to work.

But hauling the load is only half the job.

This beast is also designed to unload it,

earning its more commonly used name, dump truck.

We need to make sure we deliver

at a certain rate per hour to that crusher,

and these trucks are--

The size of these trucks are what makes it possible.

The crushers, like everything else

at the mine, run 24 hours a day,

and they need to be fed with an endless supply of ore.

So, now, we're going to head to the ROM

to dump our load in the crusher.

Every two minutes of every day of the year,

another truck delivers its cargo into the crusher,

depositing 5,511 tons of ore per hour

into the gold refining pipeline.

This sprawling complex is where the rocky ore is transformed

into the stuff dreams are made of... gold.

We're going to pour it, and we'll see some gold bars.

It takes some of the biggest machines

in the world to bring a constant stream of ore

to the gold mine's process plant.

But this ore contains less than one percent gold.

How is this precious metal unlocked

from the rock that contains it?

To get the gold out of the rocks,

the first step is breaking them into smaller pieces,

and that starts at the primary crushing plant,

a 7,500-square-foot facility

that devours this ore in immense quantities.

The primary crusher crunches the ore

into uniform 5-inch chunks.

Then a pair of secondary crushers

chews them into 2.5-inch lumps,

small enough to go to the milling plant.

So, at this plant, we take the raw ore

from the crushing plant.

And we extract the gold.

And we make gold bars.

People have dreamed of creating gold

for thousands of years.

It was the ultimate goal of alchemy,

an ancient tradition that combined chemistry,

medicine, and magic.

Alchemists were spending a lot of time

combining different chemicals

and trying to create and change nature.

The ultimate goal of alchemy was,

"I'm going to control these elements,

and I'm going to be able to produce anything I want."

And what did they want? Gold.

Transmuting lead into gold

turned out to be impossible,

but alchemy did provide the building blocks

for modern chemistry and metallurgy,

which led to this state-of-the-art gold refinery.

From the crushers, the ore is carried on conveyer belts

to the milling facility,

a 200,000-square-foot building

that houses four giant mills.

A SAG mill, semi-autogenous grinding mill,

is a huge rotating drum where the rocks are tumbled

and smashed against one another.

Uses both the rock itself and steel balls

to break down the material.

These SAG mills are driven

by two 10,000-horsepower motors.

There's four mills in total,

so we're looking at 80,000 horsepower

just in this section of the plant.

The SAG mills harness that power,

equivalent to a team of 25 diesel locomotives,

to spin the crushed ore like a dryer drum.

Inside that drum,

the ore is mixed with water

and pounded by 5-inch steel balls

until it's reduced to 1/8th of an inch chunks.

The final grinding stage is the ball mill,

a 40-foot-long cylinder

that is 25 feet in diameter,

roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment.

The ball mill is filled with 2.5 inch steel balls

that pulverize the ore

until each fragment is microscopically tiny.

By the end of the milling process,

we're down to microns.

A micron is one 25,000th of an inch,

and once the ore is this small,

the microscopic flecks of gold need to be separated

from the other minerals,

and that is done in a series of 19 6,500-cubic-yard tanks

where the ore is mixed with cyanide.

Cyanide is used because it dissolves gold.

We all know the cyanide pill.

It kills. Only takes 20 seconds.

Say goodbye.

Cyanide is used in very, very small quantity.

Copy, Joel.

- Ten-four.

And once it's dissolved,

the gold has to be collected...

with coconuts.

So, our CIP process, which is called carbon in pulp,

which is essentially tanks full of burnt coconut shells,

they absorb the gold solution like little sponges.

Coconuts are a fantastic source of carbon

because of their microporous structure.

This means they have tons of tiny pores.

Plus they're sustainable,

and the shells are actually waste from the food industry.

The gold adheres to the surface

of the microporous coconut carbon

to separate it from the rest of the slurry.

Then it's ready to be melted down into bars.

We produce around 650,000 to 700,000 ounces

of gold, dependant on the year.

All of the power and ferocity

of the enormous machines on this site

are working toward this goal,

the production of pure, solid gold.

Today, we're going to do a gold pour.

The final step in gold production

is also the most dangerous.

This molten metal will destroy any living thing it touches.

In the gold pouring room,

the precious metal is heated until it liquefies.

We're going to get the furnace nice and hot.

It is a simple elemental process

that will result in gleaming gold bars.

Once the furnace hits the right temperature,

we're going to pour it, and we'll see some gold bars.

I'm looking at the colour of it and seeing if it's bubbling.

Gold melts at 1,060 degrees Celsius.

It's relatively easy to melt,

and it's easy to work with,

which makes it perfect for crafting

everything from intricate jewelry

to precision electronic components.

This gold is about 85 percent pure,

but right now, it's as deadly as it is precious.

It's molten. It will just melt right through your skin

and, like, a third-degree burn, no problem.

If I didn't have my suit on,

it's pretty intense,

but with my suit,

I don't feel the heat.

Fatalities in the mining industry

are about one tenth of what they were 100 years ago,

but one false move can be disastrous.

I think modern mining is a lot safer

than it was before.

Most of the actually casualty that sometime happen

in a mine are human error.

There's always going to be the human factor

that can create a problem.

These are the spats that protect my feet,

protects my legs.

This should cover most of my body.

I'm going to put my respirator on.

So, right now, I'm all suited up.

I'm ready to go,

and I'm going to turn off the furnace.

As the molten gold travels down the cascade,

it starts to cool.

So, I'm going to release the bars from the mould.

So, it's going to get loud.

Throw them on the car.

And bring them to a water basin.

These bars develop slag on their surface,

a glassy by-product made from chemicals that are added

to capture and isolate the impurities in the gold.

That one's not bad,

but there's a little bit of slag on it.

The slag is not pure gold.

So, it's gold mixed with other things.

We recover all the slag.

We collect it, because it has value.

The yawning chasm of Detour Lake's open pit

grows wider and deeper every day

as mechanical goliaths work tirelessly

to pull more gold from the earth.

The might of the shovels

and the power of the haul trucks

are at the front lines of the industry

that supplies humanity with this prized metal.

Each day, hundreds of thousands of tons of ore

are shoveled, hauled,

and refined into gold bars.

That's the final product.

These machines will keep digging

deeper into the earth to produce the gold

that humanity has chased for thousands of years.