Comment by UncleOxidant
2 years ago
> Other thoughts: iron bearing silicates often contain gold. New gold rush?
Could a significant amount of gold be extracted from the water that way? It would likely be a much more environmentally friendly way to mine gold given that there would be no digging required.
If they could make it work at scale, they'd have done it with ocean water by now.
That's the sci-fi dream: all the elements you could want end up dissolved in varying amounts in seawater. It's unfortunately a hard engineering problem.
It would be significantly more concentrated in this river water. As far as environmentally friendly, maybe, but not necessarily.