Process
Gold panning is a simple process. Once a suitable placer deposit is located, some gravel from it is scooped into a pan, where it is then gently agitated in water and the gold sinks to the bottom of the pan. Materials with a low specific gravity are allowed to spill out of the pan, whereas materials with a high specific gravity sink to the bottom of the sediment during agitation and remain within the pan for examination and collection by the gold panner. These dense materials usually consist primarily of a black, magnetite sand with whatever gemstones or metal dust that may be found in the deposit that is used for source material.
Gold panning usually turns up only minor gold dust that is usually collected as a souvenir in small clear tubes. Nuggets and considerable amounts of dust are occasionally found, but panning mining is not generally lucrative. Panning for gold can be used to locate the parent gold veins which are the source of most placer deposits.
Read more about this topic: Gold Panning
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisition of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him.”
—Central Advisory Council for Education. Children and Their Primary Schools (Plowden Report)
“A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish. For him the truncated process of creating will always be an interrupted act of love, and his style will bear the shame of it, the impoverishment.”
—Yves Saint Laurent (b. 1936)
“The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)