Yesterday's walk on the beaches of New Zealand gave me a great experiment. I was playing with the ironsand, a very heavy, black sand made of titanomagnetite. There is a large deposit of ironsand on the beach at the farm. In trying to sort the different minerals, I was reminded of my gold panning trip to the Carolinas back when I worked at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum, in Memphis, Tennessee. To try your hand at "gold panning," you will need:

- a little sand
- water
- a nail
- a coarse file
- a wide, light colored, flat bottomed bowl or pie pan. A plastic surface seems to work better for me.

Hold the nail over the bowl and rub it against the file until you have a small pile of iron filings in the bowl. These iron filings will play the part of the gold or heavy minerals. Add a small handful of sand and about a cup of water. Tilt the bowl to one side and slosh the water around to wash the sand into a pile. You should have enough water to cover the sand while the bowl is tilted. If needed, add a little water.

The next part takes some practice and can be messy, so it is best to do it either outside or over the bathtub. Hold the bowl tilted, so that the low side is towards you. Keeping the bowl tilted, swirl it in a circular motion, tilting the pan gently forward and back. The idea is to get the water to swirl in a circle, carrying the sand up from the low side of the bowl and then washing it back down. If you are doing it right, yo should see the iron filings begin to be left behind on the upper side of the bowl, while the sand is washed back to the bottom. If you are moving the bowl in a clockwise motion, you will also notice the iron filings start to build up on the right side of the sand at the bottom. If you are using a counterclockwise motion, the iron will be on the left side.

This is the same idea used in gold panning. As you slosh (Slosh is a real word, isn't it?) the water up the slope of the tilted pan, it is moving fast enough to carry along all of the particles. As the water begins to run back down, slows down a bit. It is still moving fast enough to carry away most of the sand, but the denser iron filings (or gold) are left behind. The denser the material is, the sooner it is dropped and the higher up the pan the pieces will be left. Bard Ray and Floyd Shell, the two gold panners that showed me how it is done, called the heavy, black sand the nitty-gritty. When you have washed away most of the sand, then you can "get down to the nitty-gritty", to look for the actual bits of gold in your pan. If you don't have any gold, then "things did not pan out" for that batch, so you have to try again. I found it a lot of fun to see how some of the gold mining terms have crept into our language and are still used today.

Well, I have heard that some of the iron sand deposits also contain a little gold, so I am off the to beach to play.