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Gold Mining Pan

Gold can be extracted by a variety of methods. But the gold found in Placer ore can be extracted with an efficient method called as Panning.

Placer:

A placer is actually a Spanish term and it describes the river bed. The bottom parts of the rivers are formed by sand and these sand beds are a potential resting place for not only precious metals like gold but also for precious gems and gemstones. In the long forgotten ancient eras, the river beds or the placers were the major birth place of gold and gem stones.

The sand and the gravel which lies at the sand bed are mixed with the alluvial deposits. These alluvial deposits contain the gold, other minerals and also the gem stones. It is not necessary that the gold and precious metals have originated in the river bed itself. It may have been brought to the river by another rivulet or another source of water which opens or drains in to this river.

The Placer ore containing all these cocktails of minerals and gold and gemstones are suitably treated to a process called as panning to filter out all the precious items.

The first step in treating a placer ore is to pass it through a Pan.

Pan:

A Pan is just a simple dish like structure made of either plastic or made up of metal. It is quite large and the Placer ore is place on the Pan. A worker manually places the ore and adds a huge amount of water to the ore. He then holds the pan and starts to shake it forcefully in a clock wise or anti clock wise manner. The Pan is provided with a large gauge at the end. This gauge functions as a filter and also as a collector of all the filtered gold.

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

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