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Kiruna is an arctic city in Northern Sweden and it is being moved 3 kilometers east. The reason being is that it sits on top of the biggest iron ore deposits in Europe which also means that Kiruna sits right on top of a huge underground mine.
Is it worth moving a city to continue mining?
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Script Excerpt
A town or a city is often seen as something definite,
built to last and live in for a long time.
Kiruna, a city with 18,000 inhabitants in Lapland, northern Sweden; is challenging this notion.
At first glance it appears as an idyllic scandinavian settlement surrounded by picturesque mountains.
But for the people living here the picture is a bit different. For they know that the city will eventually collapse and be swallowed because underneath their feet is the largest underground Iron Ore mine in the world.
TITLE CARD: Kiruna, the city that must move or disappear
Kiruna is located 145km above the arctic circle on the eastern shore of Lake Luossa.
It is 953km away from Sweden's capital of Stockholm and the nearest major city is Murmansk in Russia some 554km east.
Even before the founding of Kiruna back as far as the 17th century it was no secret that the nearby mountains of Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara had rich deposits of iron ore inside.
But there wasn’t much that anyone could do with this knowledge.
The location was far too remote and the arctic climate far too difficult to maintain any kind of profitable mining operation.
All this changed when in 1899 the Iron Ore Line was extended to Kiruna.
Today this line runs 473km from Narvik to Luleå connecting the North Sea and the Baltic and is the primary means by which Sweden extracts Europe's largest supply of Iron Ore.
With means of transportation taken care of the city began to grow and its population expanded as the whole region became a major iron ore supplier in Europe.
during World War II Nazi Germanies war effort became dependant on these supplies.
Winston Churchill was particularly concerned about Swedish exports, From the beginning of the war, he tried to persuade his cabinet colleagues to send the fleet into the Baltic Sea to stop the Swedish iron from reaching Germany.
Later, when the Baltic ports froze over, Germans began shipping from the port of Narvik, so the Royal Navy began placing mines in the North Sea.
Attempts were made to blow up the rail bridge and the docks in the port of Narvik resulting in much fighting.
Many believe that the war could have concluded much earlier if Sweden was not as accommodating in supplying Germany with its Iron Ore.
In 1948, Kiruna gained city rights and started to receive large amounts of money from the mine.
Most buildings built before 1920 were demolished and replaced, and many of the current buildings were built thereafter,
leading up to today as
Kiruna still hosts the world’s largest and most modern underground iron ore mine.
Its production has been the driving economic factor in Northern Sweden for over a century and still is today.
LKAB is the state owned company responsible for this industry.
The mine is the largest industrial investment in modern Sweden history.
Permitting the extraction of some 75,000 tonnes of iron ore a day, roughly equivalent to the volume of a 12-storey building.
Since mining began at the site in 1898, the mine has produced over 950 million tonnes of ore.
Until 1999 the deepest level of the mine reached was 775 metres afterwards it went deeper reaching a depth of 1,045m and by 2012 it reached into 1300 meters and has likely gone much deeper since.