Unlike alluvial gold, which is found as very small flakes on riverbanks, gold-bearing rocks have to be dug out of the ground. We're after pure gold, but rock that contains gold also includes lots of ...

This process is not only cool to look at, but it also is really useful to extract gold from ore. The gold-mercury amalgam can then be isolated and the mercury is boiled off or removed chemically. This ...

Mining often happens in artisanal and small-scale mining operations that burn gold-mercury amalgams to extract gold particles. Credit: Simon Topp. For hundreds of years, the Amazon has been exploited ...