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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (80879)	1/18/2002 8:10:43 PM
From: Professor Dotcomm	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116753

I always thought that nuggets were an alluvial phenomenon just as gem stone diamonds are often found under water or in areas where it used to be under water. If so, what is the process whereby gains of gold in an alluvial solution come together to form a nugget?

To: long-gone who wrote (80879)	1/19/2002 2:53:56 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116753

Nuggets are rare. The Largest in the Natural World was found in the Croesus Mine some 40 miles west of Timmins Ontario. It was some 2000 ounces Troy ( 136 pounds avoirdupois). It is now at the ROM under the watchful eye of Bill Jackson, who has been asked to leave the premises several times when he was caught hugging it. The Croesus ran at 21 ounces per ton briefly but averaged only 3.0 ounces per ton over its life. There is a mine in Timmins that was never mined but briefly explored. It consisted according to miners who were there some years ago as mostly barren quartz interrupted by nuggets the size of eggs every now and then. I mined in two stopes that consisted mostly of visible nuggets. One was in the carbonate 21 orebody of Kerr Addison. A "sidewalk" of nuggets appeared in the back or roof of the stope. It extended for some 20 feet and consisted of 100's of smallish say, 1/10 nail head size pieces of gold. The Geological Survey of Canada used to come in and take pictures. It lasted for several lifts or about 25 feet of mining upwards. Another was a stope in Osu Lake Mines (old name) near Geraldton Ontario. The stope had 1/3 dime size nuggets at one end for an area of 10 by 10 by 10 feet. Every 5 or so inches in any direction there would be a bright gleaming yellow spot. Miners who had worked 40 or more years all over the world had never seen anything like it. Davidson Tisdale, a mine in Timmins, has a section of vein on the surface where one can locate and pick out nuggets of say dress pin head size for a good afternoon. It assays in the 100 ounce to the ton range. That is rare that is both assays and has good nuggets. My stope in Osu Lake would not assay at all in the quartz. Usually a gold vein only has gold values in the edge of the vein where it contacts the wall rock and there is mica and pyrites. When there is VG it is usually throughout the quartz and in the middle of the vein as well. I used to pan nuggets of dress pin head size from a property of sericite schist in Jellicoe, Ontario. Visible gold could not be seen, but when you panned the gold appeared. Often quartz could not be seen at all in the vein. Sometimes you could see gold in the pan when you finished from 40 feet away. I never kept any gold nuggets from mining or prospecting from BC to PQ for the past 26 years. I just threw them all back. That is the truth. The gold itself in these instances will not buy lunch, only the mining of it will. In BC in the rivers, 96% of all the gold is fine, fine gold. nuggets are extremely rare. In the Yukon, nuggets are less rare but again the greatest volume of gold is fine gold that is dust in the pan. Grains of such gold by measurement under a microscope that I have done, may be from 10 microns to 1000 microns across. (a micron is 1000th of a millimetre or 1/25,000 of an inch). You can pick up a 150 micron nugget with fine tweezers. Golds colour and reflectivity is so high that a grain of gold has perceptible colour to the smallest size of any object. If one can see yellow colour in a tiny, tiny object or grain, it may well be gold. Anything around 1/200 of an inch in size of pyrite would appear black. Gold sand is incredibly heavy and cohesive. This is in part because gold grains can exist to a very small size making surface tension a large factor in their behaviour. Once you get a bunch of dust collected it clumps together and becomes hard to randomize back into the sample. With sand such as magnetite or silica in a glass jar with plentiful gold dust you can make a fascinating gold kaleidoscope. EC<:-}