Show HN: Mines.fyi – all the mines in the US in a leaflet visualization (opens in new tab)

Even "mine.fyi" would be better at not making me think "landmine", although that would instead get read as "belonging to me".fyi.

I assume this is probably because most people don't see mines (as in gold mines) mentioned in plural very often. Or if someone does refer to multiple mines at once, they usually also specify the type of mine at the same time, like, "the cadmium mines in [country]" or similar. Or if talking about old, abandoned mines in an area, they're usually referred to as such.

The word "mines" on its own without an adjective usually does mean landmines, I think.

(I also immediately assumed this was about landmines.)

The US government has been pretty good about cleaning up the UXO it knows about, which means what's left is the UXO it doesn't know about. You'll find it near most of the current and former testing ranges, particularly Yuma Proving Ground where there's trails leading right from the adjacent BLM land into areas with potential UXO. The only real barriers are a few signs and the law.

I tried it on mobile. The clustering reduces it to 6 points for all of North America. My phone has over 3 million pixels, surely there’s room for more detail than that.

There’s a place for clustering but it doesn’t need to be so aggressive

as far as MSHA is concerned it is. They take salt out of the ground to make room for the waste.

Based on the info if you click into them, likely no. I would have expected them to be incidental materials from tunneling, but reading the description that's not the case.

Quarries?

I see quarries everywhere, and they’re kind of required near any city or road project around Australia. Never considered them as a mine though… more like a ‘general resource site’?

Wouldn't that also filter out every open cut surface mine that strips overburden and directly extracts near surface coal, copper deposits, iron ore, etc.

Not every mine is a "classic" underground mine with tunnels, etc.

See (for example) the W.Australian SuperPit gold mine which consolidated every shaft mine in a particular region into a single open pit that goes deeper than any pre existing underground mine in that area.

The US, like many countries and regions, has poor coverage of abandoned, closed, and shuttered mine sites despite such sites still posing an ongoing danger in terms of imminent physical danger (collapse, decay, etc) and untreated waste piles and ponds leaching toxins into ground waters, etc.

To answer the question posed, "how many (US?) mine sites pose a danger of type {X}" requires crawling the US BLM datasets, the OSHA datasets, the archived (from when active) MSHA datasets, and having a some luck onside for various specific sites due to large gaps and periods of not caring at all.

See:

* https://www.epa.gov/epcra/does-msha-have-jurisdiction-over-i...

* https://www.blm.gov/programs/aml-environmental-cleanup/aml

Various transnational global mining companies (Rio Tinto, et al) have extensive datasets on global resources and minesites, both operational, and past and potential future sites.

The map has a "Status" predicate.