Visiting the desert of a lignite [german: Braunkohle] open-pit mining, also known as opencast mining and open-cut mining at Garzweiler (Google maps, scroll out). The whole city of Garzweiler was completely resettled from 1984 to 1989 to another place. After that, the excavators came to dig - the largest and heaviest vehicles in the world at 13,500 tons (see article at wikipedia.com here). It's like terraforming a planet.