The Bima () was a bucket-line dredge. It was built to mine

tin Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn (from la, stannum) and atomic number 50. Tin is a silvery-coloured metal. Tin is soft enough to be cut with little force and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, t ...

in offshore

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

and

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. In the late 1980s, it was moved to

Nome, Alaska Nome (; ik, Sitŋasuaq, ) is a city in the Nome Census Area in the Unorganized Borough of Alaska, United States. The city is located on the southern Seward Peninsula coast on Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. It had a population of 3,699 recorded ...

, USA, to mine seafloor placer gold deposits in the

Bering Sea The Bering Sea (, ; rus, Бе́рингово мо́ре, r=Béringovo móre) is a marginal sea of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It forms, along with the Bering Strait, the divide between the two largest landmasses on Earth: Eurasia and The Ameri ...

off the coast. Being unprofitable at gold mining in Nome, it was sold for scrap in 1990. The barge is the largest barge to operate out of Nome for gold mining, being some 14 storeys tall. The Bima was the last commercial-scale dredging operation to operate out of Nome at sea. Prior commercial-scale land-side bucket dredges had all already shutdown by the time Bima started up.

Specifications

* Height: 14 storeys * Displacement: 15,000 ton * Length:

History

Bima was built in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

in 1976, by Billiton Mining, a subsidiary of

Royal Dutch Shell Shell plc is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New Yo ...

, to mine tin off Malaysia. It was launched in 1979, to dredge tin ore in the seas off Indonesia. It was bought by Inspiration Gold Company for US$20 million, and moved to Alaska, to dredge gold in the Bering Sea off of Nome in 1986. As a gold dredge, it operated with a crew of 95, for two shifts of 48. It concluded its gold mining in 1990, and moved to Seattle, Washington, USA, to be auctioned off, as it had been unprofitable in mining gold, though it mined of gold. At the time it was owned by Western Gold Exploration and Mining Co. of Golden, Colorado, USA; a subsidiary of Inspiration Resources Corp. of New York State, USA. It ended up being sold for scrap.

Specifications

History

References

See also