These Giant Copper Orbs Show Just How Much Metal Comes From a Mine

Tweefontein Mine.South African artist Dillon Marsh focuses on how human activity leaves traces, or scars, on the environment. Photo: Dillon Marsh

Tweefontein Mine.South African artist Dillon Marsh focuses on how human activity leaves traces, or scars, on the environment.

Photo: Dillon Marsh

Okiep West Mine 2.His For What It's Worth series is a strange visualization of the South African mining industry. Photo: Dillon Marsh

Okiep West Mine 2.His For What It's Worth series is a strange visualization of the South African mining industry.

Photo: Dillon Marsh

Blue Mine. He compiled numbers on the historical output of pure minerals from five mines in the Namaqualand region, and then used Google Earth to approximate the area of those mines. Photo: Dillon Marsh

Blue Mine. He compiled numbers on the historical output of pure minerals from five mines in the Namaqualand region, and then used Google Earth to approximate the area of those mines.

Photo: Dillon Marsh

Jubilee Mine. With those data sets, he used CGI to render huge copper orbs to approximate the amount of copper that's been extracted from the earth. Dillon Marsh

Jubilee Mine. With those data sets, he used CGI to render huge copper orbs to approximate the amount of copper that's been extracted from the earth.

Dillon Marsh

Nababeep South Mine Dillon Marsh

Nababeep South Mine

Dillon Marsh

Not too long after the California Gold Rush, a similar mania descended upon South Africa. Miners struck gold, and opportunists flooded into the country to seek their fortune. The gold has since dwindled, but the discovery of other minerals such as platinum has helped make South Africa one of Africa’s wealthiest countries by GDP.

In terms of socioeconomics and the environment, however, that wealth has been troubling: It isn’t evenly distributed among all South Africans. Earlier this year the platinum industry’s labor unions went on strike, demanding better wages. Elsewhere, mining tycoons promised village residents a stake in new mines, and have yet to deliver. These social issues are all fairly abstract. But one artist set about to make them as visceral as possible, by simply calculating just how much metal comes from a mine.

Dillon Marsh

The South African artist Dillon Marsh often looks closely at how human activity leaves traces and scars upon the environment. “Air and water pollution, acid mine drainage, toxic waste and abandoned, non-rehabilitated mines continue to be a detriment to the environment,” he says. But unlike slash-and-burn foresting, or melting glaciers, there’s no obvious visual reference for understanding the impact mining has had on the earth. The bounty is extracted from underground, and then exported elsewhere. “Due to the nature of mining operations, where minerals are extracted bit by bit over long periods of time, it has always been difficult to imagine the full amount extracted from each mine.”

So Marsh did some research. He compiled numbers on the historical output of pure minerals from five mines in the Namaqualand region, and then used Google Earth to approximate the area of those mines. With those data sets, he used CGI to render huge copper orbs, and then digitally added them to photographs of the mines. In For What It’s Worth, each floating sphere is a volumetric estimate of how much copper has been extracted from each mine.

Each orb represents somewhere between 3,000 and 300,000 tons of copper, but each sphere looks paltry when stacked against the vast, but marred South African landscapes. For an economic activity that’s usually quantified in numbers, that comparison would be hard to come by otherwise. Just imagine if that same treatment could be applied to other less-than-visible environmental concerns, like carbon dioxide emissions. For What It’s Worth is the first in a series that Marsh says will look at other mining minerals in South Africa.