[michaelleland]

Fun to see Kiruna here on Hacker News! My wife and I lived there for a year in 2014/2015. The mine is the _reason_ for the town, and it's exciting for my friends that live there to see additional minerals other than the high-quality iron ore they currently are mining.

As some other comments have mentioned, the town is being moved as the mine follows the iron ore under the current town. It's a relatively small town (~22,0000 people) but it's still a huge project to move.

The new deposit is under the town's ski slope on Luossavaara, which is the site of a now-abandoned iron ore mine. Luossavaara is the "L" in the mining company's LKAB name (Fully, Luossavaara Kiruna AB), so good that it's going to be working again under that same played-out deposit. It's also almost directly under my sister-in-law's house--which means they're probably slated to move too!

[SahAssar]

> It's a relatively small town (~22,0000 people)

Just so no-one gets the wrong idea: there was an additional 0 accidentally added there, the real number is ~22,000.

[aliswe]

I thought it was indian notation (lakh, crore)

[michaelleland]

Oh, thank you!