ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Voisey's Bay Mine

Voisey's Bay Mine is a place where people dig deep into the ground to find a special type of rock called ore. This mine is located in a faraway place called Labrador in Canada.

Now, people are not just looking for any ordinary rock at Voisey's Bay Mine; they are searching for a very valuable metal called nickel. Nickel is often used to make many useful things like coins, batteries, and even airplane parts.

To get the nickel out of the ground, people follow a multi-step process. First, large trucks and machines dig a big hole in the ground to reach the nickel ore. Then, they break the ore into small pieces using special tools.

Once the rock is broken, they put it in a big machine with water that separates the valuable nickel from the other not-so-useful stuff. It's like how you separate your toys from the ones you don't want to play with anymore. This process is called mineral processing.

After separating the nickel, it is then sent to a special plant where it goes through another process called smelting. This is like when you put your crayons in a hot oven to melt them. In Voisey's Bay Mine, they use extremely hot temperatures to melt the nickel, so it becomes a liquid.

Once the nickel turns into a liquid, it is purified to remove any impurities. Impurities are like dirt or unwanted things that we don't want in the shiny nickel. This makes the nickel even more valuable and of higher quality.

Now that the nickel is all clean and pure, it is cooled down and shaped into big bars called ingots. These ingots look like really fancy and shiny chocolate bars! But they are definitely not for eating.

Finally, after all these steps, the nickel ingots are ready to be sold and used to make different things like car parts or cans for our drinks. People all around the world need nickel, so it gets sent to different factories where they make all sorts of products with it.

So, in Voisey's Bay Mine, people work really hard to find and extract the valuable nickel from the ground. They then process it, purify it, and mold it into shiny nickel ingots, which are then used to make many useful things that we use every day.