Spectacular Pits

Do you not know what to do with your personal debt? With the economy down I set off in search of some really big pits to dump our problems in. So here you have it - some really impressive man made holes on Earth:

The Big Hole

My favorite, the deepest

hand dug

open mine pit in the world - Kimberley Mine in South Africa, appropriately called

Big Hole

. It was hand dug to 240m after diamonds were first discovered in 1866. Later the underground mine was mined to a depth of 1097m. The mine covers 17 hectares and is 463 meters wide. It yielded

2,722 kg of diamonds

- now you know why they're so hellishly expensive.

Mirny Mine

Second position on my list goes to the largest open pit diamond mine in the world, the Mirny Mine in Rusia:

The pit is

1200m in diameter and 525 meters deep.

It takes a truck

2 hrs

to drive from the bottom of the mine to the rim! This shot gives you a better scale of its size:

It is so huge that it creates a downdraft that has sucked in some helicopters flying above so now it's a no flyover zone.

La Herradura

Although diamond mines are big enough to dump even the US deficit into them and have a beautifully circular shape, I find them lacking in color. For a true feast of hues you should visit , well, a gold mine. Check out this Mexican gold mine La Herradura:

Or if Cebu, Philippines is closer to you go and check this gigantic pit:

Cebu Open Pit Mine

Where to hide US financial problems

Almost forgot that with US deficit exceeding $11 trillion (how many zeros is that?) American need some really big holes to dump their problems into. No worries though, a hole in the budget is not the only one they have:

Open Pit Mine, Nevada

or equally pictureqsue one in sunny Arizona:

Lavender Pit, Arizona

The Lavender Pit is a now defunct mine in Bisbee, Arizona. About

256 million tons

of waste were stripped to mine copper, gold and silver as well as turquoise. The toxic, acidic leftovers make for some beautiful colorations.

How you dig them

Remember the good old days when nobody cared about work safety and cheap labor was so abundant that picks and shovels sufficed to tear deep into the earth's bowels? Well, these days it's different and you need true monsters like this one to rip into the ground:

This monstrosity straight out of the latest Terminator movie is a gigantic bucketwheel excavator built by Krupp. It

stands over 95 metres tall, is 215 metres long and weighs over

45,500 tons

!

Its gigantic bucket-wheel can remove over

76,455 cubic meters

of overburden each day! It's used for strip mining coal in Germany.

So if you're feeling down and can't cope with your problems anymore just visit the neerest pit and let go off all your problems into one of them:)