How Is Iron Mined?

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Steve Jones, and I'm going to tell you a little about how iron is mined. Now, we find the iron underground, usually quite close to the surface, in large beds. Not as iron, but as what we call iron ore, which is normally iron oxide. It can be iron sulfide.The main objective is to get to the iron ore,because it's near the surface, we can simply dig a big hole, and sometimes these holes are extremely big. Maybe one or two, or three kilometers long, so here, maybe this is two kilometers, and we dig away the surface,which is soil and rock, and other things that we don't want, which we can call the overburden, and then we get down to what we do want, which is the iron ore. We then dig this away, and take it to a processing plant,where there are blast furnaces, which turn it into iron. To take it away, we need very big machines. Diggers which will take fifteen or twenty tons in a bucket, and put it onto a lorry, which will carry two hundred tons. This will be taken to a railway, usually to a train, because of the large quantities required, and will be sent away, all by rail, to the processing place, so this is how we get our iron ore, how we take it to the blast furnaces, where they turn it into iron, which we call pig iron, and then into steel, and then into the things that me and you use everyday, like our cars, our washing machines, and our refrigerators."