Sweden has been a mining superpower for over a millennium, fueling everything from Viking expansion to the Great Power era. But as a century of data from the Swedish Geological Survey (SGU) reveals, the industrial footprint of this legacy has completely inverted. The chart above tells the story of a radical transformation. While Sweden’s mining heritage was built on hundreds of small, labor-intensive sites—peaking at over 260 active metal mines during World War I—the modern r