Photo by David Hellmann on Unsplash Gold Mining Methods Last Modified: 4th November 2014 There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold... -Robert Service (1907) Summary Historically, the majority of gold was mined from "placer deposits" , where gold has settled out of an existing or ancient waterway downstream of where nuggets had eroded out of rock outcrops. Some early miners also used an early form of hardrock mining, digging solid veins of gold out of rock, where mineralized water had deposited it over thousands of years. Today, gold is extracted in hardrock mines that directly mine the source rock, or "lode" of gold, where it was originally deposited by geochemical processes. Most ore accessed this way today contains only microscopic grains of gold, and it takes tons of rock to produce ounces of gold. Hardrock mines can be either underground mines or strip mines, and...
