Mining for Gold: Inside One of the Most Dangerous Jobs

Nov.18, 2008— -- When the credit crunch hit, I panicked. What to do with my meager savings?

Apparently, in bad times, your best bet is to hoard gold. So I watched the price on the London and New York exchanges rise and fall. I was too scared to dip my toe in the investment waters, but it got me thinking... What's life like for the guys who actually mine the stuff? We persuaded "Nightline" that this would make a story and headed for South Africa, producer of half the world's gold.

Just after dawn, our crew rolled up to South Africa's Mponeng gold mine, which is about to reclaim the title of the world's deepest mine at 2.4 miles underground. Our insatiable desire for gold is pushing the South African miners deeper underground than man has ever gone before.

Sweating under a hard hat and into a boiler suit and rubber boots, we gingerly stepped into the elevator cage for the drop into the bowels of Earth. We dropped into darkness at more than 30 miles per hour. Almin the cameraman worried the humidity would fog up his lens. I was worried about pretty much everything: Killer gas, rock slides, runaway trains, claustrophobia.

A miner was killed at Mponeng by a train in August, and four were killed last year by one seismic shift. There's a huge board at the mine head proclaiming today as the 21st day in a row without an injury. For a gold mine that's a mighty impressive record. For me, little comfort.

"How much further is it possible to go?" I asked Mervyn Gillespie, the mine's production manager, as we dropped at 30 miles per hour. "We don't know," he replied. "We'll see when we get there."

It costs about $260 to produce an ounce of gold from this vast labyrinth. And it takes a ton of rock to produce an ounce of gold. As long as the math makes sense, they'll go deeper.

When we got out of the elevator I had trouble walking. I felt 100 pounds heavier. My heavy arms felt like they were dragging me down -- hardly surprising, since we were nearly 10 times deeper than the Empire State Building is high.