A gold dredge is a placer mining machine that extracts gold from sand, gravel, and dirt using water and mechanical methods. The original gold dredges were large, multi-story machines built in the first half of the 1900s. Small suction machines are currently marketed as "gold dredges" to individuals seeking gold: just offshore from the beach of Nome, Alaska, for instance. A large gold dredge uses a mechanical method to excavate material using steel "buckets" on a circular, continuous "bucketline" at the front end of the dredge. The material is then sorted/sifted using water. On large gold dredges, the buckets dump the material into a steel rotating cylinder that is sloped downward toward a rubber belt that carries away oversize material and dumps the rocks behind the dredge. The cylinder has many holes in it to allow undersized material to fall into a sluice box. The material that is washed or sorted away is called tailings. The rocks deposited behind the dredge are called "tailing piles." The holes in the screen were intended to screen out rocks.
Concept
The basic concept of retrieving gold via placer mining has not changed since antiquity. The concept is that the gold in sand or soil will settle to the bottom because gold is heavy/dense, and dirt, sand and rock will wash away, leaving the gold behind. The original methods to perform placer mining involved gold panning, sluice boxes, and rockers. Each method involves washing sand, gravel and dirt in water. Gold then settles to the bottom of the pan, or into the bottom of the riffles of the sluice box. The gold dredge is the same concept but on a much larger scale. Gold dredges are an important tool of gold miners around the world. They allow profitable mining at relatively low operational costs. Even though the concept is simple in principle, dredges can be engineered in different ways allowing to catch different sizes of gold specimen. Hence the efficiency of gold dredges differs greatly depending on its specifications.
History
By the mid to late 1850s the easily accessible placer gold in California was gone, but much gold remained. The challenge of retrieving the gold took a professional mining approach to make it pay: giant machines and giant companies. Massive floating dredges scooped up millions of tons of river gravels, as steam and electrical power became available in the early 1900s. The last giant gold dredge in California was the Natomas Number 6 dredge operating in Folsom, California that ceased operations on 12 Feb 1962 as cost of operation began exceeding the value of the gold recovered. Many of these large dredges still exist today in state-sponsored heritage areas. Gold dredges were used in New Zealand from the 1860s; in Otago rivers like the Clutha River and the Molyneaux River, and in West Coast rivers like the Grey River.
Today
In the late 1990s and through today, dredging has returned as a popular form of gold mining. Advances in technology allow a small dredge to be carried by a single person to a remote location and profitably process gravel banks on streams that previously were inaccessible to the giant dredges of the 1930s. Today dredges are versatile and popular consisting of both floating surface dredges that use a vacuum to suck gravel from the bottom and submersible dredges. Large dredges are still operating in several countries of South America, Asia and Africa. In 2015, gold miner Tony Beets reconstructed a 70-year-old dredge. As of 2016, this is the only operating large dredge in the Klondike. However, he is currently working on fixing up a second dredge 33% larger than the first one. In Season 7 Episode 20, titled Dredge vs Washplant, it was shown that in a 2 day test the running costs of the dredge were approximately 25% of those of running a washplant and feeding it with heavy equipment. Environmental impact studies show no clear positive benefits from suction dredging and potential negative impacts on stream systems. Small scale suction dredging in rivers and streams remains a controversial land management topic and the subject of much political turmoil.
