• Question: How do you extract minerals from rocks?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      This depends on the mineral. Some can be physically extracted (breaking-up the surrounding rock to the mineral), while other can be chemically extracted and their crystals precipitated out of solution. Some minerals can also be extracted using super-heated steam/water, and again the minerals precipitate out of solution. There are many more ‘solutions’ to getting your mineral (that was a very bad joke!).

    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Often this is just by breaking up the rocks into smaller bits and then separating out the minerals. You can also dissolve the minerals and then re-crysallise them as pure minerals. It really depends on the minerals. Some minerals are easy to separate as the crystals grow to be really large. For example there are some caves in Mexico called Cueva de los Cristales (Giant Crystal Cave) where the crystals of a mineral called gypsum can grow to over 12m long! They are very old and the temperature in the cave is very hot and so you can only go down and see them for short periods of time and have to wear protective clothing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      You can watch a video about how they get gold silver and platinum (and other metals) out of rocks here
      http://www.jmrefining.com/page-view.php?pagename=Video-page&language=

    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I had no idea, so I have learnt something new here! Everyday is a school day, right?

    • Photo: Simon Redfern

      Simon Redfern answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I do it with a hammer!

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