Prospecting and Mining Gold

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt believed gold to be the “flesh of the gods” and insisted on being buried in it. While it isn’t commonly used for coffins these days, gold still remains a valuable asset. Gold is still used as an investment, possessing actual, physical value, much like a piece of property.

Of course, even those of us who don’t invest in gold are familiar with it in the form of jewelry. Wedding bands, necklaces, bracelets—you name it. What most people don’t realize is all the work that goes into extracting, processing, and refining that gold to turn it into your favorite pieces of jewelry. Gold starts out like any other hunk of rock. It takes an experienced mining company, like Graystone Mining, to properly obtain the gold from that rock.

Prospecting

In the old days, discovering gold relied entirely on blind luck and happenstance. An old prospector might stumble upon a bit of gold in a stream or in a crack between rocks. These days, the process of finding gold is a little more systematic as geologists now know how gold forms.

The precious metal is actually present in almost all rocks and soil, but the grains are so tiny that they are practically invisible to the naked eye. It’s the job of scientists, known as prospectors or explorationists, to find the areas where gold is concentrated enough to be mined profitably. In most of these deposits, the gold is combined with silver or another metal. Scientists have to drill to obtain samples to analyze for gold content. With enough gold, the mining company can set up a large scale operation to extract the gold.

Mining Gold

The process of mining gold is dependent upon the type of deposits. Lode deposits are those found in solid rock. If the rock is above ground, the mining company will use open-pit techniques. Miners will drill holes in the rock and fill those holes with explosives. The explosives break up the rock and grind them into smaller chunks, making for easier transport to the extraction facilities.

If the lode deposits are located deep underground, miners have to drill a deep shaft, called an adit, into the ground to access the deposits. They then dig long vertical tunnels, called stopes, extending from the top of the block of ore to the bottom. Miners then drill and insert explosives into the ore block. The explosives break the ore into pieces, which fall to the bottom of the stope, where they can be loaded into trucks.