Each excavator bucket holds about 30 tonnes — more than 66,000 pounds — of soil or ore.
And one truck can be loaded up with three buckets full of soil, or more than 200,000 pounds.
At the Botuobinskaya open-pit mine, which I visited in Yakutia, about 60,000 metric tonnes — or more than 66,000 US tons — of soil and ore are extracted in a 24-hour period.
Once an open-pit mine has been depleted, it's typically turned into an underground mine and operations continue below the surface.