Baffinland Iron Mine
| Location | |
|---|---|
 Baffinland Iron Mine
|
|
| Territory | Nunavut |
| Country | Canada |
| Coordinates | 71°19′24″N 079°12′38″W / 71.32333°N 79.21056°WCoordinates: 71°19′24″N 079°12′38″W / 71.32333°N 79.21056°W |
| History | |
| Opened | 2014 |
| Owner | |
| Company | Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation |
| Website | www.baffinland.com |
The Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation is working to develop a large open pit iron mine in the Mary River area of Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. It is said to be the world's sixth most northerly mine.
Paul Waldie, a Globe and Mail business reporter, called the project one of the most ambitious in any Arctic region, and said it was expected to "triple the territory's annual gross domestic product growth rate and provide nearly $5-billion in tax revenue and royalties to the territory over the life of the project."
Environmental critics express concern over the impact the railway will have on migrating caribou, and the impact the frequent passages of the big ice-breaking freighters will have on sea mammals.
Archeologist Sylvie LeBlanc has described how the railway line will parallel the longest line of ancient inuksuit yet found -- Inuit navigation sculptures—over inuksuk sculptures in a line 6 kilometers long.
In 2012, in a move that surprised many observers, Baffinland seemed to abandon its original development strategy, where a railway would have transported ore to a new port on the south coast of Baffin Island in favour of having ultra-large dump trucks convey the ore directly from the mine-site via a "tote road" over 100 kilometers to a new port on Baffin Island's north coast. The move surprised observers because the original plan had spent several years undergoing an environmental assessment, and was abandoned not long after the plan had been approved. The plan to carry ore via giant trucks has not gone through an environmental assessment. Baffinland has asserted that changes in the market for iron ore required a plan that was less expensive to get underway, even if it would be of limited capacity, and would be more expensive to run.
Iron ore was first discovered in the Mary River area by Murray Edmund Watts (founder of Watts, Griffis and McOuat Limited) and Ron Sheardown, in 1962. But exploitation of the ore body waited for an increase in the price of ore. According to the Railway Gazette International the ore in this ore body is sufficiently pure that it will not be necessary to conduct any processing before shipping it to market.
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Wikipedia