The Gold Rush

This is often in the rivers where is found gold in powder form, mixed with sand that lines in the beds of rivers and streams. To extract the gold dust was used in ancient time skins of animals deposited in stream bottoms to catch gold. The sand and gold (heavier than water) were retained in the hair of the furs and lifted from time to time to sift the precious metal. When the Greeks saw for the first time these Golden Fleece, they thought at first it was a magical breed of sheep whose wool was mixed with gold.
But the great gold rush of modern times begun in 1848. At that time, the discovery of large flakes and nuggets in Californian rivers has attracted hundreds of thousands of adventurers who came here from all over the world, to seek their fortune.
Since then, geologists have explained the origin of these extraordinary veins.
The Sierra Nevada mountain range pleated in the secondary era, then reduced by erosion in plateau during the tertiary era, is full of volcanic rocks from ancient volcanoes. In these rocks from the center of the earth were dispersed large amounts of gold. Slow erosion (rain and runoff) caused all that gold along the mountains, to the bottom of valleys. Flakes and nuggets were found as well with other debris (silt) in river water.
The gold miners were working in the Heroic Era like the ancients during the time of the Golden Fleece, they were scraping the sand of rivers and sifted to extract gold dust.
After Eldorado, we found gold in South Africa, Canada and Alaska. But now, the extraction methods are industrialized. It should also implement huge resources to extract gold content in the sand or rocks for the gold fields that do not generally contain from 10 to 20 grams of the precious metal per ton of earth.

Contributor: gwengoat
Source: Fantastique-arts.com

Submited: Apr. 02 2012 Page viewed: 8319 Page viewed 8319 times

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