03-26-2012, 10:59 AM
Glad to be able to pitch in... 
It's analogous to salt and water... When you put salt in water, the crystals dissolve and you get what is called a salt solution, then when you heat the salt solution, the water evaporates and the salt is left behind. When you add gold to mercury it dissolves (Amalgamates?) and you end up with a mercury/gold amalgamate. When you heat this the mercury evaporates and you end up with the gold again...
So you can't really extract gold from mercury, when it's dissolved in the mercury you can extract it, but it has to be in there first!
In gold mining they take rock that contains small doses of gold and crush it to a powder. Then they put that powder in mercury. The mercury will ignore the rock but dissolve the gold. Then you heat the mercury and get the gold.
During the gold rushes in latin america and africa the gold diggers were often not very environmentally conscious so much of the mercury ended up in the environment poisoning entire ecosystems and the human populations living in it.
It's analogous to salt and water... When you put salt in water, the crystals dissolve and you get what is called a salt solution, then when you heat the salt solution, the water evaporates and the salt is left behind. When you add gold to mercury it dissolves (Amalgamates?) and you end up with a mercury/gold amalgamate. When you heat this the mercury evaporates and you end up with the gold again...
So you can't really extract gold from mercury, when it's dissolved in the mercury you can extract it, but it has to be in there first!
In gold mining they take rock that contains small doses of gold and crush it to a powder. Then they put that powder in mercury. The mercury will ignore the rock but dissolve the gold. Then you heat the mercury and get the gold.
During the gold rushes in latin america and africa the gold diggers were often not very environmentally conscious so much of the mercury ended up in the environment poisoning entire ecosystems and the human populations living in it.