Sunday, October 03, 2004

The World Will End Tomorrow!

Sodom and Gamorrah are about to bite it.

Volcanoes are the ultimate natural disaster (other than collisions with giant space rocks, supernovas and the like), and I shouldn't make light of them. But, at least from the vantage point of the Canadian Shield, they're such a huge thing it's hard to think of us being in the same realm as they, and thus hard to take seriously.

BTW this article on Minnesota says that the iron is mostly gone from the Iron Range. The guides at the Soudan Mine tell you that there is still at least as much ore left in the mine as they've taken out, but it's not (yet) economically feasable to extract it. The ore is supposed to be the purest ever found - it was never necessary to form it into pellets, like the taconite ore usually found in Minnesota, to make it economically viable. The problem is the sheer expense involved in lifting it over 2500 feet to the surface.

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