The Sheer Size of It All

Massive scale is a defining feature of the recent past. There were big things in antiquity—the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico; the Colossus of Rhodes, which stood at two thirds the height of the Statue of Liberty until an earthquake snapped it at the knees in 226 BCE—but there weren’t many of them. Not long ago I climbed to the top of St. Olaf’s Church in Tallinn, Estonia, which the tour guide claimed was the tallest building on earth into the seventeenth century; it was tall, but not what we’d call Tall. Not far from my home on the western shore of Lake Champlain lies the ore bed that in 1875 produced 10 percent of America’s iron ore; the #21 pit, once storied, stretches two hundred feet wide and three hundred feet deep. So—big. But a generation later, with the discovery of iron ore in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, we begin to reach modern-scale Big. The Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine in Hibbing (whose native son sang about it in “North Country Blues”) is three and a half miles wide, eight miles long, and 535 feet deep. There’s a visitor’s center on the edge offering a view, though it had to be moved in 2019 to allow for the expansion of the mine.The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is p...