The lignite mine that jeopardizes what remains of Hambach forest, nearby the city of Bonn, is a sci-fi landscape, a boundless chasm that broadens as far as the eye can see.Since the pit’s width, it’s hard to sense immediately its depth. Then, with growing awe, the gaze falls into soil for hundreds of meters, from terracing to terracing.Each step downward, each shade - ochre, brown, white - of the clay loam leads our spatial coordinates to update. A feeling of estrangement takes shape, it is a sensation that the preparatory look to Google Maps let foresee, still being unable to fully reconstruct.The crater is populated by machines, so tiny from afar, striking from up close. I found on the web that the mine holds (or held) the record for the biggest terrestrial vehicle. Bagger 293, that’s his name, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator «96 meters tall and weighs over 14.000 tonnes. The mechanical arm is 225 meters long and the bucket-wheel itself is 21 meters in diameter with 20 ...
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