In video games players are constantly mining ore that just sits on top of the map, where do ores like copper, tin, silver, gold, iron actually come from in real life and how did we find and mine it?
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In the shortest sense, most modern mining is done in mountains and/or underground, but will vary on location, mineral, and local regulations or changes. You generally mine rocks, which will contain the goods/metal you’re after, most stuff isn’t found as “pure” metal, but instead as a compound containing the metal.
Processing those rocks into metal and other items is a really complicated process and will be different for each one, but at the end, you go through a long processing phase, and you end up with metal.
The processing part is one of the major things that held back mining a lot of metals throughout history! Even if people could find it, and know it was in there, extracting the metal from certain rocks had to be solved, and its NOT easy.
They are found by prospecting/exploration.
There is several ways to do this, but for large scale operations, it’s usually geologist and surveyor that use their knowledge of geology to figure out where different veins could happen. Then you have technology like airborne electromagnetic detection, and other system to detect clues that could indicate where an higher concentration of a certain mineral could be found.
Then when a sufficient concentration is found, mining engineer will have to develop a plan to extract it, either surface of depth mining. They will have to figure out the nature of the soil, depth of the vein, the properties of the ore, etc. The ground is then extracted and brought to a place where the mineral is extraction from the ore through different method (physical, chemical, etc). You never really found pure mineral in nature, it’s usually either mixed with the surrounding soil or chemical bounded with other elements.
Or can exist on the surface of the earth and can have very high metal content like in games. That is how mining and usage of metal started. People mined surface sources with high metal content first for obvious reasons
But because there is a limited amount of ore with that high metal content on the surface and the amount of it today is very low. As a result, we have to move if from underground and often with quite low metal content.
Other post has explained how it is done today but points out that ore can exist like in games too even if it is rare today with most used up.
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