acanthite
User is Offline
Joined: 08 May 2007
Posts: 261
Location: Western hemisphere
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| Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 12:07 pm Post subject: Au nuggets |
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Here are some gold nuggets I've bought from small-scale miners in South America over the years. The area they come from, unlike the western US, is very poor in silver, thus the purity of gold is a bit higher. The nuggets are, for the most part, not extracted from streams as they were in California in the 1850's, but from large pits dug directly into the primary gold deposits. Some are amalgamations of smaller grains, fused together during the heating process that burns off the mercury (mercury is used to fix gold on to the sluice if it is too fine grained to fall out by gravity separation).
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