How do you obtain gold?

Answer 1

you go to a pawn shop

Answer 2

Basically gold can be found in free form, as flakes, powder, or dust. It is heavy, and compared to water for instance, will sink to the bottom. Stones, pebbles and sand can be sloshed off the top with water. This method is called panning, and is hard work. You generally do it where gold might be found in streams and in the ocean near shore. This gold got there from higher up in the mountain, and often has been eroded as the rock that contained it was broken up by freezing and thawing, and just erosion. Took a really long time, but the gold is in free form. As mentioned previously, gold sometimes is in nugget form, as being a part of a gold vein that again was derived from a vein in the rocks. Much of the present gold in this form is being mined in places like Alaska by a method called dredging. Here a large machine, about the size of a ferry boat, has a bucket belt at the front that scoops up the sand and stones from a river bed, all the way to the hard rock underneath, and then runs it though a sieve with water underneath. Any gold in the mix sinks to the bottom, and is retrieved, and the remaining sand, pebles and stones continue out the back of the dredge to be deposited back into the stream in which the dredge is operating. All of these methods are called placer mining, or a form thereof.
Much of the available gold is captive as small dust sized pieces in hard rock. Quartz is the major one here. The rock has to be broken into small pieces, and then placed in mills (large rotating barrels with either long rods, or small iron balls in them) to grind the rocks into a powder size material. This material is then leached by cyanide, to create gold cyanide. The liquid recovered in this process is then further processed to extract the gold. I was in Waldorf, Colorado a long time ago, and some enterprising people were milling and leaching the mine tailings (scrap) left over from mining when they could find enough gold as dust in the veins of gold.
Gold is a fantastic material, and the mining and extraction of it is also fascinating. I hope that this helps.
Some interesting sites:(run the video)
http://www.alaska.org/fairbanks/gold-dredge-no8.jsp
http://www.nomealaska.org/vc/gallerygold2.htm

Answer 3

Pan for it at in streams at the base of mountains in California and Alaska where gold was found historically. There's a possibility that more recent storms have washed more gold out.
Good luck with that.

Answer 4

2 main ways

*you can mine it, sometimes it occours in thick viens; just dig it out, crush it up and process it, the method is farily simple
*if you have not very good yielding rocks (down to about 2%) you can leach the gold out using cyanide; it works, but is a very nasty chemical and tends to have an affiliation for killing anything downstream of them mine (numerous areas around the world are testiment to this)

hope this helps

Answer 5

You can buy gold bullion from a reputable dealer. Shouldn't be too hard to find online. If you'd rather buy it like a stock, use an ETF (exchange traded fund) like GLD. Then you don't have to store the gold- it's 'in' your brokerage account...

Answer 6

Alchemy