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It is the only one operating coal mine in the world where you can get into with a tour.
The mine in Barentsburg is the one with the shortest coal production and the northernmost one among all the Russian mines.
Since the moment when the first coal was produced on Svalbard, mines here have massively changed: machines and mechanisms for the coal mining and transportation have been introduced and mine galleries have become wider. There’s only miners’ labour which remains constant – exhaustible and requiring non-human willpower and courage.
On the mine tour you can see a war between man and nature, mechanisms of getting into the ground depth and of mine reinforcement and collapse protection. You can learn how the coal is being produced and transported onto the surface. You can talk with a miner, a person who spends a big part of his life underground. You can hear sounds of the underground mine core and feel a breath of the wind going up to the surface from the half-kilometer depth.
