It looks like a modern gold mining. Photo

18

Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото The photographer showed people on the big career.

What do you know about gold mining? Most likely, you will have the bearded miners on the Creek in the forest, with steel trays in his hands bringing the Golden sand, or dredge with a sieve, sifting tons of water in search of nuggets. All as shown in the westerns and movies about the gold rush in America or Australia. But in the XXI century it is slightly different. And to find out how exactly we went to the far East, where the bulk of the precious metals extraction in Russia.

Here we take a metal

Of course, these days, and the extraction of placer gold and search for gold nuggets, but in industrial scale the most noble of metals is mined in a very different way — in quarries and in mines. And mined not from gold veins, as it may seem ignorant person, and literally made of stone, the ordinary stone. Hi medieval alchemists! Their dream came true in the XX-XXI centuries.

This does not mean that you can so to take and come to any place, to take a shovel with a pick, loading rocks into the truck and go to turn them to gold of 999 tests. In fact it is quite complex and time-consuming process, which employs an army of experts: geologists find gold ore and horizons (as a rule, they are underdeveloped and hard to reach places), the engineers are developing a project quarry or mine, then you need to build a road to the future mine, to drive large numbers of necessary machines and equipment to build a camp or even a small town to provide electricity and water, the life of several hundreds or even thousands of workers and only then proceed to field development and production of gold.

Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото

The road to Anfisa

We drove up to the bridge through one of the tributaries of the Amur river. The driver stops the car, gets out of the trunk of the orange flashing light on the magnet and posts it on the roof of our Toyota Prado. Then a few minutes walks away to talk on his mobile phone. There, over the bridge, across the river, when already there, and it will not be for several hundreds of kilometers right up to the accommodation village Albazino. To reach this point with the village — a mandatory rule: if something happens and the car will not be here in an approximate estimated time, help can only come from there.

From Amursk — more than 400 kilometers on the bumpy winter road on which move timber truck with gold ore concentrate, creeping from the field, Yes, curious foxes to hares.

To Albazino we get closer to the evening without any adventures. This is a unique, rich gold Deposit, known since 1912. More than 100 years ago in the Big Creek Kuyan and its tributary — the key Ivanovo — was the discovery of gold placers. In 1954 Herbaczynska mine management has confirmed the presence of gold, and in 1989 senior geologist Nizhneamurskaya prospecting expedition Anatoly Kurochkin in the course of prospecting-evaluation works here opened the field. One of the new ore-bearing zones in honor of the youngest daughters pet, he called the Mail. Now this is the name of the largest quarry from which extract gold ore. In addition to Anfisa, there are still mines Olga, Nadezhda, and Ekaterina. Recently found another ore zone and named her Farida — in honor of the hospitable employees of the Department of personnel Varvarinskoye Deposit in Kazakhstan.

Looking at scurrying through the horizons Anfisa 100-ton dump trucks that across career look like tiny ants, could not help wondering: this is how much gold is mined from a giant pit? It’s millions and millions of tons of ore!

Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото

How to get to precious 7 grams

It is important to understand that not all career contains gold. Not even gold is contained only in specific strata and horizons in various parts of the quarry. These areas need, first, to find, and secondly, to reach them, and, thirdly, to extract gold-rich ore. It’ll take her to the processing plant, and all the rest is so-called sterile breed that goes to the dump.

Sometimes to get to the gold horizon, we have a few days dozens of trucks to remove waste rock. Simplified quarry operation is to continuously take out waste rock (called overburden) in search of gold ore. Blasting, to loosen, to take out. Again blow and again take out. All this happens under the constant supervision of geologists who daily take the design of your sites hundreds of samples of soils and in online mode they are sent to the lab a few kilometers from the quarry. In the lab 24 hours a day, crushed rock, and conjure her to melt what is in it. According to these hundreds of samples experts updated daily interactive map of career to understand, where they reached the desired area, and where we need to continue to remove waste rock.

On the background of millions of tons of blade gold-bearing horizons look a drop in the bucket. Even less drop if you think about it in figures of gold content in the “rich” ore. Figure 7 grams per ton is considered very good. If more gold — it’s all luck. 7 grams per ton! Now imagine how much scrushy will have to move to get to that ton with 7 grams of gold, and eyes generally are rounded. What a giant effort for the yellow metal! That’s really really the precious metal.

To understand the scale of gold mining, here are some figures: Mining and processing plant, which we visited, got more than 40 tons of gold in the flotation concentrate. This means that from the quarry on the surface of the raised 6 million tons of useful ore. This is 60 thousand trucks! If they build one after another, the convoy will stretch for nearly 700 miles. How much sterile ore was extracted for the extraction of gold, only God knows.

Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото
Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото

Well, where’s the gold

But the most interesting thing in this story is that the gold none of the people who work here can not see. Because raw gold looks like a mountain of ordinary stone, not visually different from conventional aggregates. Then it will be sent to the beneficiation plant where it will produce a gold concentrate. Then take it to the hydrometallurgical plant. Now it get bars. Only it’s not those gold bars, as we understand them, and the ingots of alloy doré is an intermediate product. They will be sent to a refinery, and there only gold will acquire their final form gold bullion of 999.9. But all this long the way we will describe in the following materials.

Так выглядит современная добыча золота. Фото

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here