Malmberget
Encyclopedia
Malmberget is a locality and mining town situated in Gällivare Municipality
Gällivare Municipality
Gällivare Municipality is a municipality in Norrbotten County in northern Sweden. Its seat is located in Gällivare.The municipality is the third largest in Sweden, but it has not been amalgamated with other entities....

, Norrbotten County
Norrbotten County
Norrbotten County is the northernmost county or län of Sweden. It borders Västerbotten County to the southwest, the Gulf of Bothnia to the southeast. It also borders the counties of Nordland and Troms in Norway to the northwest, and Lapland Province in Finland to the northeast.The name...

, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 with 6,017 inhabitants in 2005. It is situated 5 kilometres from the municipal seat Gällivare
Gällivare
Gällivare is a locality and the seat of Gällivare Municipality in Norrbotten County, Sweden with 8,480 inhabitants in 2005. The town was founded in the 17th century...

.

Malmberget is known as a major site for the extraction of iron ore from deep mines
Mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

 by the company LKAB
LKAB
LKAB is a Swedish mining company. The company mines iron ore at Kiruna and at Malmberget in northern Sweden. The company was established in 1890, and has been 100% state-owned since the 1950s...

. The iron ore mining started in 1741 at the Illuvaara mountain, later known as Gellivare malmberg and eventually just Malmberget. The first train transporting iron ore was loaded in 1888 - this was the beginning of the great iron ore rush which would change the entire area of Northern Lapland. In Malmberget there were lots of job opportunities but no dwellings - a striking resemblance to the conditions during the gold rush in North America. During the first years, workers lived in shacks built from wasted dynamite crates.

Right down the center of Malmberget, the deep mine has reached daylight and thus created a huge hole called Gropen ("The Pit"). Gropen has grown southwards as the deep mining continued, and thus divided the town while making the old town centre uninhabitable and forcing many institutions (e.g. the two existing cinemas and the church) to move to the western part of Malmberget or, even more commonly, to the neighbouring town of Gällivare.

Today Gropen is being filled up with stone which is dug up as a by-product from the underground mines. Gropen will eventually be filled in, but the uninhabitable area is continually growing as underground mining undermines the area and seismic events caused by the mining regularly shake the remaining parts of Malmberget. The future of Malmberget is currently uncertain, but prospecting by LKAB indicates that even more of Malmberget may have to move in the future. The moving of several large residential houses owned by the mining company, as well as private villas, has been a major issue locally for the past few years.
The iron ore extracted from Malmberget is mainly transported by rail southeast to the port of Luleå. (See Swedish iron ore during World War II
Swedish iron ore during World War II
Swedish iron ore was an important economic factor in the European Theatre of World War II. Both the Allies and the Third Reich were keen on the control of the mining district in northernmost Sweden, surrounding the mining towns of Gällivare and Kiruna...

).

Sports

Malmberget's largest sports association is named Malmbergets Allmänna IdrottsFörening (MAIF). MAIF's colors are green and white and has an athletic tradition spanning more than a hundred years.

The local football club is Gällivare Malmbergets FF
Gällivare Malmbergets FF
Gällivare Malmbergets FF is a Swedish football club located in Gällivare.-Background:Since their foundation in 2005 Gällivare Malmbergets FF has participated in the middle divisions of the Swedish football league system...

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