Mueez Khan
Mueez Khan
Mapping open-pit mines in the US
Explore an interactive map about open-pit mines in the US.
Published: 2026-09-06
Last updated: 2026-09-11
side-project
python
environment
polars
leafmap
leaflet
Earlier I was reading Bad Energy by Joshua Frank which goes over some of the underlying negative processes taking place in the transition to renewable energy. The first chapter discusses open-pit mines which are used to harvest minerals including copper which are used for some renewable energy tech. There are significant environmental risks to consider especially having seen how certain companies handle open-pit mines. You can look into the book or other resources on open-pit mines and their impacts (there are pros and cons). In the meantime I personally wanted to visualize the locations of open-pit mines starting with the US just to easily identify where they are in my local region.
Note that open-pit mines are around the world, and to reiterate I'm just starting with mapping some in the US. There is a list of open-pit mines from around the world on Wikipedia from which I'm getting all of the data from. I'm not mapping all open-pit mines, but this is more of an experiment to do so with Marimo. Also note that one of these is a former mine and now a "National Historic Landmark", feel free to discover the mines' history to identify which mine it is.
I was exploring Marimo, which offers an alternative method to Jupyter notebooks when working with Python and SQL. Much of the visualization effort was done with the leafmap Python library, along with basic usage of Polars to read a CSV file into a dataframe which was then visualized with folium.
It's a pretty straightforward map, so feel free to view how I was able to generate it with the Marimo notebook output embedded below.
Note: If you're on a mobile device then you may need to zoom out on the map so that you can see the available map pins denoting where the open-pit mines are.
Share your thoughts
Submit a comment about this post that may be shared.
Join the Newsletter
Receive updates during my career.
Featured Publications
Technical writing on work experiences, projects, and tools you may find useful.
Mapping open-pit mines in the US
Python
Polars
Folium
Leaflet
Marimo
New "Typing with Typst" course
Typst
Generating Plotly charts for water data
Python
Polars
Plotly
Data visualization
Gazetteers for Texas Water Data Hub
JavaScript
HTML/CSS
Python
Leaflet
Boerne Water Data Dashboard
Next.js
Rust
Data visualization
Data engineering
Polars
Plotly
commit-helper
Rust
Building a CKAN Release Timeline
Python
CKAN
TimelineJS v3
HTML
View more written content on my blog.