How do you find and mine metals?

Question

i want to know how to find and mine metals plz help me

Answer 1

There are a lot of ways. First, different metals form ores more commonly in certain types of geological environments than in others; some environments are good for one class of ores, while another environment is more typical of a different class of ores. The metals that occur in each of these various ore types differs. It really helps, but isn't necessarily required, to have a good idea of how these different environments will affect how and where the ores will tend to be found.

To complicate thngs a bit, some metals occur commonly in a few completely distint classes of ores. As an example, important gold deposits are found both in moderately to high grade metamorphic zones that have seen high temperatures, and in low temperature hot spring type environments.

Certain metals tend to group together in ores, and have secondary associations of metals and other elements that can serve as indicators. Sometimes, one can identify a good zone for prospecting by looking at the chemistry of sediments, because the sediments come from erosion of ores and associated rocks.

Another factor that can be important is the role of structure. Structure is the way in which the earth is faulted and folded and otherwise affected by tectonic activity. A lot of ores form from migrating hot fluids so identification of structures can be useful as these areas will act as piping for the movement of the hot fluids.

Another useful way to peform exploration is to use geophysical measurements of the density of the crust (slight variations in gravity), electromagnetic behavior, and seismic behavior to identify prospective zones. The Kidd Creek deposit in Timmins Ontario was found in this way, sort of by accident. The planes that used to fly over the bush used to use a certain area near timmins to calibrate the instruments before doing their surveys. It turned out that the area used for calibration was underlain by a really huge copper-zinc deposit that someone decided to drill into one day.

The best exploration indicator is, of course, the presence of already discovered ore bodies n a given area. It is rare that an area will have only one single deposit, so a lot of money and effort is spent in areas already known as good prospects.

Of course, most of the easily found deposits (those at and near the surface) have already been found and are under exploitation or are claimed by somebody or some company.

You would think, after I have said all of this, that the odds are very much against the individual prospector, and to a certain extent this is true. But there have been major discoveries by individuals in the past couple decades-my understanding of the discovery of the Hemlo gold deposits in Ontario is that the discovering prospector got his samples from a road cut on a remote highway, something passed frequently by many people on a daily basis.

Mining is an entirely different story, and again depends on the type of ore, its mineralogy, the way it occurs, and a whole slew of other factors. I will leave that to someone else to answer.

If you are interested in ore geology and prospecting, you really need to do some studying of all of the various aspects of geological fundamentals. The grizzly prospector with the mule and a pickaxe is no longer common.

Answer 2

dentifying Metals: These include gold, silver, copper and any other metal that is valuable and non ferrous. These should respond to a metal detector as metallic, as long as they are in a conductive form and there is a sufficient amount to interfere with the electromagnetic field of the search coil.

Minerals: For all convenient reasons the only mineral that a metal detector will recognize as mineral are magnetic iron ore or black sand. It is very easy to test this whether the ore contains a predominance of either metal or mineral. If a sample of ore does not have neither metal nor mineral, the metal detector will not give any response.

A mineral response from the metal detector does not automatically show there is no metal there, but that there are more minerals present. When the sample gets a metallic response, you can be sure that it has metal in conductive form in such amounts that you should search the specimen very thoroughly. The capability of response of metal detectors with discrimination give these days make it one of the most important tools for being able to identify metal versus mineral.

There is a little bit of a possibility that a specimen could have electrically equal quantities and precise amounts of metal and mineral. In this sort of case, they would each neutralize or balance out the effects of the other, and an indication would not be obtained.

Remember that a specimen testing mineral, nonetheless, should not be discarded as containing some amount of metal; the results of the tests could have shown only a prevalence of mineral. If the specimen shows there is metal, you can be sure that it has some metal in conductive form in an amount enough to disturb the search coil’s electromagnetic field.