smelting

Etymology

verb

1. present participle and gerund of smelt

noun

1. (metallurgy) The process of melting or fusion, especially to extract a metal from its ore.
   Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands. 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion