The ammonia still hangs heavy in the air from the last blast. Drenched in sweat, the faces of the miners on the morning shift betray nothing but concentration. Yet when the previous night’s explosion took them a few metres further into the South African rock this week, their gold mine, Mponeng, became the world’s deepest.
The pride of the managers at Anglogold Ashanti’s flagship operation is not enough, however, to reverse the terminal decline of an industry that at its peak in the 1970s produced two-thirds of the world’s gold.
