the.com/ore extraction
digging up rocks because they secretly contain metal, then convincing them to admit it.
means the process of mining and processing mineral-bearing rock to pull out valuable metals or elements from the useless rock around them.
from from latin ora, meaning shore or region, later meaning raw metal-bearing rock; humans have been smashing rocks for copper since roughly 5000 bce, long before anyone wrote the word down.
grade realitygold ore can be 99.9997 percent worthless rock
energy hogcrushing and grinding uses more energy than smelting itself
scale shiftmodern trucks haul 400 tons per load, not baskets
leftover mountaintailings often outweigh the metal recovered by thousands to one
for instance
bingham canyon utah — open pit visible from space, mined continuously since 1906
grasberg mine indonesia — largest gold mine on earth, over 7000 feet deep
kalgoorlie super pit — australia, produces roughly 850000 ounces of gold yearly
cerro rico bolivia — silver mountain that funded the spanish empire for centuries