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GEOLOGY UP CLOSE
At a unique site near Golden, a skilled
professional geologist helps students
understand how those rocks and
mountains all fit together.
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MOLYBDENUM!
What’s that again? Molybdenum is an essential ingredient in
making high-strength steel. At the
Henderson operations you’ll see how the
finely dispersed mineral is recovered.
After crushing and grinding, the pulverized ore is mixed with water and a kind
of soap. Using air to create soap
bubbles, all
that soapy foam collects and floats the tiny
molybdenum particles to the surface, where
they’re scraped off and saved.
Here’s some of those scrubbing
bubbles at work.
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CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS
For every American, there’s more than 11
tons of sand, gravel, and crushed rock mined every year. It’s all utilized to make
all those concrete, roads, bridges and homes we want and need. Here’s a firsthand look at some of those
operations in a nearby quarry.
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ALL ABOUT GOLD!
At the Cresson Mine near Victor, gold ore
is mined on a very large scale. More than
300 Coloradans work here, mining nearly
____ thousand tons each day. After drilling and blasting, the ore is
excavated using machines that can dig room-full bites, and then hauled off in
monstrous trucks that are even bigger.
After being finely crushed, the ore is deposited in
carefully-prepared large basins. Then water mixed with
special chemicals is slowly percolated through the piles
to dissolve the tiny specks of gold. The process is very
much like you use every day to brew your morning cup of
coffee or tea. Gold - enriched water drained from those piles is
collected, the gold extracted, and finally melted to
create the gold buttons seen here.
Each button weighs ____ pounds, and each contains
about $______ in gold value.
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COAL
Nearly 40 million tons of coal mined are mined in Colorado each
year. All of it is used in regional power plants to generate clean electric energy.
Your field trip also may include a visit to a large regional power plant where some
of that coal is used.
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Surface Coal Mining
This is the Trapper mine, where
coal seams near the surface are uncovered using large draglines.
In less than a minute this
gigantic machine digs a room-full
with each bite. After the coal is
uncovered and then removed, the
ground is restored, and finally
replanted with the same native
vegetation that was there
before.
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ANYONE FOR WALLBOARD?
We all take it for granted. It’s
that smooth surface for the interior walls in all our homes and nearly every
building. Sounds simple: Dig up a lot of gypsum, grind it, roast it, grind it, mix it with water and it
becomes plaster. Then encase all that wet plaster between two continuous sheets
of recycled paper, four feet wide and miles long. Dry it, cure it, and then cut
it all into precise 8-foot lengths. And all at warp speed! These field trip
visitors are seeing it happen in the ultra-modern plant of American Gypsum
Products.
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SERIOUS RECYCLING!
Coloradans have been making steel since 1881. You’ll see an ultra-modern facility where
mountains of recycled scrap metal are melted in clean electric arc furnaces, refined, and
then cast into tons of high quality new steel industrial products.
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Underground Coal Mining
Deeply-buried coal seams can be recovered safely and effectively using the
modern fully-mechanized longwall mining system. Rock above the coal bed is held
up by a line of powerful hydraulic supports, while the longwall mining machine
extracts a thick slice from the full coal seam. After mining each pass, the
supports are moved forward to provide support for another slice, and the rock
subsides behind. This photo is from the Twentymile Mine, which employs nearly
400 Coloradans to mine and ship nearly nine million tons each year.
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