Gold tends to be heavier than other minerals, so when one pans, gold settles to the bottom.
So gold ore (rocks) can be seperated on site fairly easy, everything else will need to be shipped somewhere seperated and refined (processed)
It's similar to the oil process. First you drill it and and put it in a container, ship it to a refinery, and different products are produced from the raw product.
There is even a new process where fine gold dust that can't be seen can now be extracted from other minerals in the soil. It was on a special about mining on the history channel or science channel. It was rather interesting how far we have come in regards to extracting minerals from raw material.
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