sluice

People on social media brandish gold-flecked pans and nuggets while showing off their equipment, ranging from old-fashioned picks to gold-separating sluice boxes.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2025

Yet after back-to-back atmospheric rivers walloped California in less than a week, it wouldn’t take much for water, mud and boulders to sluice down fragile hillsides, experts warned.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 6, 2024

As the tide ebbs the water is released through a sluice, which pushes a water wheel, which turns the grinding stones.

From BBC ● Oct. 21, 2023

A combination of damaged sluice gates and high water might tear away a few gates, but would not be expected to rip apart so much of the dam, the professor said.

From New York Times ● Jun. 6, 2023

But the principal domain of the junior probationers was the sluice room.

From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan

Sometimes they can be overgrown with vegetation or, in the case of drains and sluices, blocked.

From BBC ● Dec. 9, 2025

Postgraduate researcher David Vandercruyssen said: "High tides can be limited to existing levels simply by closing sluices and turbines and existing low tide levels can be maintained by pumping."

From Science Daily ● Jan. 13, 2024

The human-made mudslides that resulted were directed through troughs known as sluices, which had grooves to catch flakes and nuggets of gold.

From New York Times ● Apr. 25, 2023

The panel came back with a suggestion that the country create an elaborate infrastructure of dikes, dams, storm barriers and sluices so that future catastrophic flooding will not occur.

From Salon ● Sep. 1, 2021

Then, when they had entered a large well-lit room that buzzed with metallic activity, the sluices opened and the flood of explanation poured forth again.

From "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov

We sluiced into 2022 with another La Niña winter pattern bringing more snow and rain that lasted well into spring, yet again dampening gardeners’ spirits.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 12, 2023

Marshland is born of rivers: as silt is sluiced down from the land to the sea, the tides in turn lift it back onto the land.

From New York Times ● Nov. 6, 2018

Later, I bike down to Boise Whitewater Park, where two artificially sluiced standing waves draw kayakers and surfers but, alas, I’ll have to return to catch this.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 13, 2017

If true, it would have largely defeated the purpose of requiring the keycard insertion—not to mention all those sluiced doors and biometrics and PIN codes—in the first place.

From Slate ● Dec. 21, 2016

With the tree cover stripped from the uplands, rainfall would have sluiced faster and heavier into the creeks, increasing the chance of floods and mudslides.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

The action sets sail with a hefty oceanic sequence where Edwards leans on his expertise in sluicing fins and underwater ka-thumps.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2025

Then came the Industrial Revolution, crunching and sluicing away, and changing pretty much everything: social structures, urban spaces, land use, belief systems, historical topography, not to mention the chemical properties of earth, water and air.

From New York Times ● Mar. 23, 2023

Thawing permafrost is undermining Indigenous villages, summer sea ice is vanishing, and water is sluicing off Greenland’s ice sheet in record amounts.

From Science Magazine ● Dec. 14, 2021

For decades TVA, like other utilities, primarily dealt with this waste by sluicing it into unlined pits and impoundments.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 24, 2019

I spent a moment at Miss Maggie’s cistern, dusting myself off and sluicing rainwater over my head, before I met her at her door.

From "Beyond the Bright Sea" by Lauren Wolk