“The largest scale mining was called hydraulic mining. So they divert water, and like a firefighter with a big hose, they’d wash off an entire mountainside, which just had very fine flakes of gold. to wash of something of that scale, they’d run all that muddy slurry through these sluices with mercury at the bottom, and the gold, also very dense, would settle out and stay in the mercury. They’d run it out for a day or two, cut it off, burn off the mercury and the gold would stay behind,” McCord said.
So, you know, really environmentally sound practices.
The mercury mined in the Lake Berryessa region was used to mine gold in the Sierra Nevada. The technique, though long since abandoned, continues to poison water in both regions.
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