Well, let me tell ya, if you ever wondered how they get that shiny gold outta the ground, it ain’t like picking apples off a tree, no sir. It’s a whole process that takes time and a lot of work. First thing, they gotta dig up that rock where the gold’s hiding. Now, gold ain’t like other stuff you find in the dirt, it’s tricky to get out, and it’s buried in rock that don’t look like much. So, what they do is crush that rock down real fine, almost like powder, so they can get to that gold quicker.
Now, once they got that fine powder, they ain’t just picking it up with their hands like you’d pick beans. No, they treat it with something called sodium cyanide. Now, don’t ask me what that is, ’cause I ain’t got a clue, but I do know it helps get that gold out. This cyanide mixes with the gold in the rock, and it makes the gold come loose. It’s like the gold don’t want to stick to the rock no more, so it just lets go and floats into the liquid.
Then they take that liquid and pass it through carbon, like a big sponge, and the carbon soaks up the gold. After that, they do a little magic trick, I suppose. They treat the carbon with another mix of stuff—caustic soda and more cyanide—and it makes the gold separate from the carbon. After that, they end up with something they call gold cyanide, but that ain’t the pure gold yet, no. They still gotta do a bit more work to get it all clean and shiny.
Once they got the gold cyanide, they go through a process called gold parting. This is where they turn that gold cyanide into almost pure gold. Now, I ain’t no scientist, but from what I hear, this part is tricky too. They gotta do all sorts of things to separate the gold from other things that got mixed up with it. By the time they’re done, they got themselves some nice shiny gold. But that ain’t the end of it.
After all this, they still need to refine the gold to make it the good stuff people wanna buy. There’s a few ways they can do that—like flotation, amalgamation, cyanidation, or carbon-in-pulp. Don’t ask me too much about them fancy names, ’cause I don’t rightly understand all of ’em. But I know one thing, they all start with grinding up the ore real fine, just like before, to make sure they can get every little bit of gold out.
Now, you might think it’s all easy, just diggin’ up the gold and boom, there it is, but no. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work. And even after they get the gold, they still gotta make sure it’s clean and pure, so people can use it for jewelry or coins or whatever else they use gold for. It’s a lot of steps, and each one’s important. If they mess up somewhere along the way, they might lose out on a lotta gold. So, that’s why they gotta be careful, real careful, when they’re doin’ this process.
In the end, gold don’t just appear outta nowhere. It takes people who know what they’re doin’, some chemicals I don’t understand, and a whole lotta time. But once it’s done, you get yourself some beautiful, shiny gold. And that’s the whole process of how gold gets from deep down in the earth to the shiny piece of jewelry you see in the shop window.
Tags:[gold production, cyanide process, gold mining, refining gold, gold extraction]