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Gold And Mining

Gold has been mined for centuries together, with evidences dating back even to the ancient Roman era. The procedure employed in procuring the gold out of the soil or the earth bed is called as Gold Mining.

Gold Mining involves numerous complex procedures and can be broadly grouped as follows:

Panning:

Panning is a procedure which employs manual mining. It can be used only on a small scale and is not suitable for large scale commercial mining. May be used as a gold mining procedure where human labor is very cheap and freely available. The gold which is mixed with sand and gravel of river beds, in areas known to be historically gold rich, are passed through a pan kept underneath the water levels and manually shaken. Gold being quite heavy settles easily to the bottom of the pan and then it is manually removed.

Metal detection:

This type of Gold mining is actually not a proper mining, because it only involves finding out of the probable areas where gold may be found and does not actually dig out or extract the gold. Metal detectors are very efficient in picking up signals and can detect the yellow metal even if it is embedded 1 meter deep below the surface of the earth and is a favorite among the gold diggers.

Sluicing:

This is the usual method employed to mine out gold and is used mainly by the small scale businesses and budding miners. The sluice box is a simple tool to filter out the gold present in the gold rich material. The waste part which is flushed out of the box is called as tailings. When done on a large scale basis, there are detectors used to filter out the unwanted matter like gravel, sand, etc.

Dredging:

Dredging is done using a machine which is small enough and floats on the river. A worker will control the working while staying under the water. Another worker stays on the machine and controls the suction process. The machine basically consists of a sluicer and suction is used to take up the gold mixed water and filters it out. There is also another type of dredging which is done using large machines and is used by miners on a large scale. Here the gravel of the river bed is fully recycled and put back in to the water after filtration.

Hard Rock mining:

Majority of the gold is mined out in this way from the rocks.

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