Well, the title says it all, pretty much. How is the metal, mercury, found in nature? Being a liquid at room temp, I WAG it is not found as an ore. So what’s the SD on quick silver?
- Jinx
The most common form of mercury found in nature is mercury sulfide, also known as cinnabar.
Thanks for the info! …I think I ate one of those cinnabars once! 
I can never resist them whenever i go to the mall…
Ah, Cinnabon. Delicious - and about as good for you as consuming the same quantity of cinnabar. (I think each one includes something like half a pound of butter and 6000 calories.)
Just to be nitpicky, an ore is generally defined as being a mineral (chemical compound) from which a resource can be extracted. Mercury is found as an ore. The term for finding the metal in its base state (eg gold) would be native metal.
With all the mercury warnings on fish consumption, one would think a lake bottom would have a fare amount.
The mercury deposits of Almadén, Spain account for the largest quantity of liquid mercury metal produced in the world. Approximately 250,000 metric tons of mercury have been produced there in the past 2,000 years.
The New Almaden mine, near San Jose, California is the oldest and most productive mercury mine in the United States. Mining operations ended in 1976 when Santa Clara County bought the area for use as a park.
Those are organomercury compounds such as methyl mercury. The mercury is in the fish, not floating around in the water or sitting at the bottom.
<shameless hijack to fight ignorance, please forgive me>
Not quite, but they are damn near sinful
</shtfipfm>
Actual question based on the OP:
Why did they want to mine this stuff and convert it to liquid mercury? What were the uses that they felt it was important enough to use it for?
One use is explosives, like blasting caps and cartridge primers.
That addresses modern usage, but what about ancient usage?
LOTS of instrument uses besides thermometers - every thermostat used to contain a mercury switch before they became electronic. Dental amalgams. Gold mining. Batteries. Manufacturing processes such as caustic soda and chlorine. Certain types of paints and pesticides.
Oh, and mercury was used historically to treat felt, of course. The process was banned in 1941. And the Daguerreotype photo process and silvering mirrors. It was used as an anti-syphilitic treatment at one time. The more recent uses in anti-fouling paint and herbicides were banned in the 1990s.
It’s a nice park, and pretty large, for being right on the edge of San Jose. I’ve hiked in it a lot, since I can be there in 15 minutes or so. The way the now defunct rotary furnace operated gives one pause, though - you just heat the ground up cinnabar, and you get mercury vapor and sulfur dioxide. The rotary furnace condensed out the mercury vapor and vented the SO2 to the air.
I know that Search isn’t broken, because I found this in a thread about the same question.
It even has pictures.
Mad as a hatter…
And silver mining. According to this site mining accounts for around half of all the mercury ever produced (and the residue may represent a significant problem today).
Thanks, lady! I was pretty sure the issue of mercury as naturally occurring native metal had been addressed here before, but lately I’m getting time-outs if I so much as run a Google search, so I didn’t want to work the hamsters into a frenzy to verify it.
It was used as a laxative. Bottoms up!