Hydraulic Mining
Hydraulic mining, or hydraulicking, is a type of mining that uses water to displace rock material or move deposit. Formerly, the use of a huge volume of water had been urbanized by the Romans to take out overburden and then gold-bearing debris as in Las Médulas of Spain, and Dolaucothi in Britain. The method was also used in Elizabethan Britain for developing lead, tin and copper mines, and became called as hushing.
The current form of hydraulicking, using jets of water directed under very elevated pressure via hoses and nozzles at gold-bearing upland paleogravels, was initially used by Edward Matteson near Nevada City, California in 1853. In California, hydraulic mining frequently brought water from elevated locations for long distances to holding ponds numerous hundred feet above the region to be mined. Insofar as California hydraulic mining exploited first and foremost river gravels, it was one type of placer mining that is, working of alluvium (river sediments).
Process of Hydraulic Mining
Early placer miners in California found that the more gravel they might process, the more gold they were probable to determine. Instead of working with pans, sluice boxes, long toms, and rockers, miners collaborated to determine ways to process bigger quantities of gravel more swiftly. Hydraulic mining became the vast-scale, and most devastating, type of placer mining. Water was redirected into an ever-narrowing channel, in the course of a large canvas hose, and out a giant iron nozzle, known as a "monitor." The tremendously high pressure stream was used to wash complete hillsides through huge sluices. By the early 1860s, while hydraulic mining was at its height, small-scale placer mining was a thing of the past. The huge majority of lone prospectors could not uphold themselves, and the mining industry was taken over by great companies, most of which discovered hard rock gold mining (or quartz mining) more gainful. By the mid-1880s, it is predictable that 11 million ounces of gold (worth around US$7.5 billion at mid-2006 prices) had been convalesced by hydraulic mining in the California Gold Rush.
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1. How many people in your group?
2. How many years were the districts placer deposits mined extensively?
3. What has the districts gold production been estimated at?
4. After a lawsuit, Hydraulic mining was curtailed in what year?
Drive North to N 38 29.229 W121 03.139.
From here you can see a long rock face that is all that is left of a large hill to the West.
5.Estimate how long the mining went from left to right and how tall the face is at its tallest spot.
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