Geology of coarse crystalline gold - Big Gold nugget geology - Formation of large gold nuggets

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and today I got something special to talk to you about course gold nuggets check that out those are some big nuggets that I've found in the past and the excitement of finding big nuggets like pulling a thousand dollars out of the ground when you're digging for gold it's amazing it's something that you know you want to experience and like I say I've experienced it a number of times and it's awesome we're gonna talk today about the geology of coarse gold we're gonna talk about how exciting it is to find big nuggets we're gonna talk about the geology that forms course big nuggets and then at the end we're gonna talk a little bit about where you might look to find nuggets like these so come on with me we're gonna take a look at this stuff and we're gonna get started right now so in talking about coarse gold I got to tell you of course gold it isn't as common as we'd like but then if everybody could go out every day and dig $1,000 or more worth of gold out of the ground there'd be everybody be out in the hills but I'll be honest it's a rare find and I've done it a bunch of times over the years but it's not something you do every day I'm gonna show you some amazing finds though because there are still people out there making amazing finds in the in the ability to basically making amazing finds out their prospecting okay here's one a hundred and fifty six ounce nugget that was found some years ago in California this was found with a metal detector pretty hard to believe a hundred and fifty six ounces honestly I think if this specimen were set out on the auction block and sold today it'd probably go for something close to a million dollars it's amazing but you know 156 ounce nuggets are not very common I certainly have never found one quite that large now but there's other nuggets big nuggets and coarse gold that's being found and if you want to be part of this if you want to have that excitement then watch this video you'll stick along with me because I'm going to tell you all about how that happens I'll show you some other specimens here you know some interesting stuff that gives you an example of what's available out there you know you don't have to settle for just a couple little specks there is big gold out there to be found if you know what you're doing and you know what to do when you get out in the field if you know how to find it it's out there to be found but the formation of really big nuggets takes some very special conditions some very special geology like I say there's a zillion specks out there if you want to go out and find two specks no you can go out there and find two specks in a lot of places but I'm talking today to guys and gals who aren't settling for a couple specks you want to find more a good job that's the first step you want to do better so learn the skill and the knowledge that you have can put you over big gold okay that's what you need to do is gain that knowledge and skill and that's kind of the stuff we're gonna talk about today we're gonna delve into the geology and special conditions in the ground that it takes to form Jayant well not necessarily giant even just big coarse gold pieces like this three-quarter ounce nugget that I found in Alaska it's a nice fine pretty amazing huh if you want to find out more pieces if you want to find pieces like that stay tuned now most people he wonder you know how does golden get into the ground you know people say stuff like oh it came from meteors well you know Stardust is kind of what the whole planet isn't so you want to know a little bit more specific about how nuggets form okay well it's kind of hard to believe but cold actually will dissolve in water in the right conditions now just say hey Chris I've seen gold rings in water I've washed my hands with a gold ring on and the gold didn't dissolve it's not like sugar well okay it takes special conditions and one of the things that it takes is sulfur and in hot sulfur ii conditions with a little bit of acid and doesn't take a lot although can have more than just a little tiny bit the gold will start to dissolve and it will be collected by water as it flows through the system and then redeposited so you come to this point of thinking about gold can dissolve well okay the gold that forms into veins and into big nuggets where does it actually come from in the system you know is it coming from the country rock around or is it coming from lava and magma down below well actually it can come from both and it can come from in part from both or mostly from one or the other so as water circulates through the system it gets heated and driven up because hot water hot things rise just like a hot air balloon rises in the hot you know hot air will rise in cooler air hot water will rise through cooler water just that same way you will find that gold can get the water will circulate through the system and many types of rock have tiny tiny tiny tiny traces of gold in them literally a few parts per billion so it you know in a mountain worth of rock there's a little tiny bit of gold and as this hot water circulates through the system because it's set up to dissolve gold it can dissolve gold out of the system and redeposited another place that gold comes from is from hot magma or that sort of molten rock down below the earth you know most of the magma is made up of minerals that form normal rocks like the lavas of basalt and and other things but a small fraction of lava is other things that don't incorporate into rock very well and part of that is the sulfur that gets into the system but sulfur can come from sedimentary rocks too sulfur can come from a lot of different places but the magma molten rock from deep within the earth can also contribute gold into a system that deposits it and creates a hardrock gold deposit now talking about that magma the magma is this even if it never comes to the surface and a lot of times even if you don't really see it the heat within the earth because you know if you go down far enough there's a certain gradient that then as you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the earth it gets warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer as you go down you come into contact with hot rocks and with magma and that currents kind of thing molten rock is magma and it provides the heat to drive the system and of course if that heat gets to the surface then you have things like that boiling hot springs or like this Old Faithful but deep within the earth how does the hot water that gets exposed to either just heat in the rock from rocks that are near magma or if it comes actually fairly close to the magma itself you know how does that water circulate you know I talked about water circulating through the rock you know you might be wondering hey Chris I got to tell you Saul raw water just doesn't go through it like a sponge of course not and so it takes some sort of conduit some sort of thing that will allow the water to move and usually in most cases those are fault systems basically shear zones of closely spaced faults and breaks in the rock and of course cracks and breaks in the rock sure that allow water to circulate and so the water will circulate through cracks breaks bolts in the rock and it will allow it to come up and cool off or be exposed to other kinds of rock that will allow the formation of some sort of vein or other hardrock gold deposit now we've talked about these veins and one of the things that I said is that sulphur is necessary to carry the gold to dissolve the gold into the hot water solutions that form the veins and sulfur will dog is able to solve it and carry it through as the solution circulate well it's not surprising that in these veins you find minerals with sulfur in them not just the gold actually that the the gold and sulfur combination is not stable at normal temperatures and so when things cool off the gold releases from the sulfur and you get free native gold and the sulfur will then combine a lot of times with other minerals or other metals or different things to form various sulfur minerals and perhaps the most common of these is iron sulfur or iron sulfide which is pyrite okay and very common in gold-bearing quartz veins that's why you find pyrite is because there's sulfur it carried the gold and then after it's done of course not there's way more sulfur than it's necessary in the system and so you get that all this sulfur the software that carried the gold plus the excess sulfur will form minerals like pyrite or chalcopyrite if there's copper around or our sino pyrite if there's arsenic around or other sulfide minerals a can't die d'argent ight if there's silver around okay so it's important to note and be aware that sulphide minerals are very common and a lot of times if you have just no sulphide minerals at all in a quartz vein that'll tell you something it tells you that there wasn't the sulfur available to dissolve up and carry the gold with it along as the vein was formed now we've talked about the gold and the formation of the veins but the tricky thing with coarse gold with large Nuggets and that kind of thing is yeah a lot of veins the gold in there is tiny that's why there's a zillion little tiny specks for every big nugget every big nugget every even big nugget that you find there's a zillion specks because it takes special conditions to form big coarse gold and that's what we're gonna talk about now you see coarse and large crystals of anything take time to grow don't know if you guys have ever tried growing rock crystal sugar in your house you know you dissolve sugar into real hot water and hate remember that that hot water dissolves sugar a lot better than really cold water at least a lot more sugar than go into hot water same concept with gold only gold goes from being virtually insoluble and the right conditions sulfur super high heat and of course if that heat you have to keep pressure on it or the water just boils away that dissolves gold so anyway back to the rock crystal thing if you put sugar into really hot water and you get enough sugar in there it will slowly grow Rock Christel but you have to set the jar or container whatever aside and let it grow and sometimes it takes weeks or months to row the largest crystals in in when you're doing that take my month sometimes maybe more to really grow and and form that large crystal of sugar same thing happens with minerals it's the same idea you have to have stable conditions that allow the mineral to grow slowly from a little tiny thing bigger bigger bigger bigger bigger here's a picture of a huge piece of Beryl this is a pink Beryl called morganite this is the biggest gem quality morganite Beryl I've ever seen in my life I saw it at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show but it would have taken super stable conditions for a really long time in order for a crystal of this perfection to grow and that goes for all kinds of minerals for quartz for feldspars other gemstones you name it big crystals take time to grow and in order for that time to happen you have to have stable conditions that don't change it has to be just right for growing and then it has to stay the same for a good long time and that's the kind of conditions that you need to form coarse gold you have to have the right growth conditions and then it has to remain stable for the the big nugget they're big you know big piece of gold to form now a lot of you probably don't think about gold being a crystal and like wait a second Gold's a metal it's not a crystal well a lot of times the Nuggets that we find have been rolled and beat up like this 3/4 ounce not yet I found in Alaska this thing is smooth ooh then and waterworn and it's been beat up and so you know all you see is just a smooth surface but the inside of nuggets like this looks completely different let me show you you see the inside of a nugget has crystals that have grown on the inside of it and they formed when the nugget formed it's not something that formed Oh later years later no this formed when the nugget was originally formed and if you if you go to a place where the gold has not traveled any distance a lot of times you'll get pieces like this and this is a two-thirds of an ounce nugget that's all wires and little crystals and flakes this is something that formed in a vein system in Nevada but it grew slowly it had time and it grew into crystals so let me show you some other crystal structures that are basically gold showing goal is grown in the ground as crystal but these are big pieces of crystalline gold so now we've seen that gold grows as a crystal and I've told you that it takes time for any kind of crystal be it rock crystal sugar or a piece of gemstone like that big morganite barrel or some of the courts are some of the gold crystals that I've just shown you things grow it takes time now just as a contrast a lot of the big mines in Nevada are famous for their microscopic gold now you can see the gold if you use like an electron microscope but generally speaking the gold it isn't visible unless you have a real high-power microscope then you can see the pieces of gold it's visible under a powerful microscope but you can't see it with your eyeball and now this kind of gold forms in very chaotic conditions that are constantly changing in fact a lot of them a lot of the gold in this kind of situation is formed in what they call a boiling zone where the pressure has come off the water if you have water that's above boiling if you keep it under pressure it won't boil away that's what pressure cookers do when you're cooking food with a pressure cooker keeps the water under pressure so it can be a little hotter than boiling well if you're out in some place in Nevada and you have hot gold-bearing water and it comes close enough to the surface that it can boil it will boil and the gold will all come out but instead of having nice stable conditions that allow the growth of big crystals it's boiling and changing and and you know you have pressure coming off and and the solution is rapidly changing and so you get microscopic tiny crystals so it goes both ways it's not just the it's not just having the stable conditions and growing big crystals but you have unstable conditions that grow microscopic crystals and a lot of the gold in hard rock veins is in between those two extremes it's not big coarse gold and it's not tiny microscopic stuff it's stuff that you can see but it's smallish because it didn't have time to grow something larger so we've talked about how stable conditions are required to grow big gold in the ground that's a good thought and and it's an important consideration when you're considering the geology of big coarse gold but now we want to consider where in the system are you going to find that you know if you're looking at a series of gold deposits a gold district we're in the district are you gonna find that now some districts there are districts out there randsburg in Southern California is one of them that has both big vein systems that produce really small gold and small vein systems that tend to produce coarser gold and that's a kind of a lesson for us that smaller kind of more out-of-the-way backwater type systems don't get the big flow through them that the big veins do and they tend to grow coarser gold because of the smaller systems the water doesn't circulate as fast through a small opening it takes its time and it tends to remain more stable the systems I mentioned in Nevada where the water boils and and the gold that's created is teensy tiny microscopic well that tells you something those are huge systems with lots of water and lots of changing chaotic conditions but the backwater places little veins a lot of times it's the little veins that produce pockets of gold you know one of the things that prospectors are constantly on the lookout for is rich pockets I know some guys who've found dozens of ounces sometimes a lot more looking at little pockets it often in little tiny scenes these are small veins and sometimes they're even discontinuous they don't you know go for a long long ways there are discontinuous little vein let's that form and these are the kinds of systems that can have pockets now of course not every small vein system is filled with pockets of gold of course not I wish but a lot of times when you do find the coarser stuff its associated with the smaller vein systems that are more like the back waters of the system that the big flows of water hot water going through they make the big vein and the for commercial mining purposes the big vein is really the most important and produces the largest amount of gold but the coarsest gold comes from little tiny veins now even in little tiny veins but this is true for big veins too something has to happen to shake the gold out of the system you know water dissolves the gold okay it's in the solution it's in that hot water what takes it out well you know we talked about the rock crystal sugar type things that rock candy type of thing that you know in those situations it's the liquid cooling very slowly but that and that can happen in gold veins too it can slowly cool and the gold can come out but there are other things that can cause the gold to come out it can be changes in pressure like I mentioned the boiling solutions in Nevada that creates the tiny gold well that's a pressure change that allows the liquid to go from being hot but contained and so it doesn't boil to pressure relief and it just boils so pressure changes sometimes chemistry of the wall rock so I've seen places where there are rich super rich pockets of gold that formed where the little vein crossed over a layer in the country rock in the wall rock that was super rich in iron so the old-time miners in California and hay in Australia too used to call these iron seams or iron zones that that the the vein would cross across something like that and suddenly we're in that area where across and there would be a big giant pocket of super-rich gold ore I mean literally you know rock that was many ounces of gold per pound of rock so a you know changes in wall rock chemistry can make the gold come out of solution another thing to consider is that solutions even in a pretty stable type of situation the solutions change over time it's very common that you can get a banded type of vein system as you get solutions change over time and those bands equate to you know the solution was made me rich in sulfides you get a sulfide rich band and then the solution is maybe rich in quartz so you get a quartz band and then the solution was maybe rich in sulfides again so you get a sulfide band and sometimes the sulfides are different maybe one sulfide band is pyrite but another sulfide band is mostly Galena sometimes they do have bands that are super rich in gold and it happens as the solution changes in these systems over time even in stable type systems the solutions will change somewhat over time and oftentimes the earliest solutions tend to be quartz rich and gold poor the middle time solutions tend to be sulphide rich and gold moderate and then the last solutions tend to be super rich in gold and that's where oftentimes you do get pockets also you have these super rich gold solutions forming through these little veins you know here's a picture of something that shows some of that kind of rock where the gold is that the quartz is just full of gold and it's coarse gold because it forms slowly so one of the things about big veins and little veins is big veins have a much better tendency to crop out you know it's not a perfect thing but big solid veins that don't have a lot of sulfides or gold or anything else and I'm a value you know those big we'll crop out and be really obvious on the surface the old-time miners called those bull quartz veins because they're full of bull and there wasn't a lot of gold in oftentimes there now I've seen a few occasions we have a big bull quartz vein and on the foot wall or the hanging wall is a riches o9o place in nevada where and i've gotten some visible gold where the footwall zone is it's got some decent gold in it but all the rest of the vein the big solid quartz not much nothing much gold and going in in that stuff it's in the little foot wall and and that's why even in some veins you have if you have big coarse gold it tends to be either on the foot wall the hanging wall or right down the middle a lot of times the other you know in between will be just quartz with not a lot of golden so the big veins drop out and are very visible but little veins tend to not be so obvious they don't have the minerals to stick up out of the ground and be really easy to see they intend you instead you get little bits of quartz scattered all over the ground and maybe even not that much because in a small quartz vein there may not even be I mean there's there's quartz in the vein but as a percentage of the whole area may be a really small percentage of the total area that you're looking at and so there may just be a bit of quartz vein here a bit of quartz vein there scattered around little quartz veins just don't outcrop as much and that's one of the reasons that metal detectors are great at finding pockets because you know the old-timers could see the big giant quartz veins that outcrop you know kind of like this but the veins that were hidden you know they're not so obvious in fact here's an example that's just outside a town in the gold country of California and the vein you know it's you can see it's buried by five foot of soil and so who would see that vein and unless you dug a road cut so we've kind of talked a little bit about the kind of places or the kind of geology that tends to throw coarse gold into the system that tends to produce coarse gold let's talk a little bit about where you might want to search for coarse gold now I can't like list off 10,000 places all over the US and Australia and you know Africa and everywhere else that might produce coarse gold that you might want to go look at but I can talk about the kinds of places that you want and how you might come about with come up with ideas for yourself in the area that you live so most places that a produced gold will have reports and and items that were produced by geologists you're telling about the area and your state will probably if your state produced any significant amount of gold the geology or others you know Bureau of Mines dependent you know just depends on what it's called in your state that what the agency is called will have reports and what you want to do is look through those reports and find one find places that the old-timers at least found some coarse gold okay if it's a place that produced only little tiny nuggets and specks in that kinda stuff probably not a great place to go look for coarse gold but if it you can find in these old reports that it produced coarse gold then that's a good place to start now what I suggest and what's been helpful for me is to use a metal detector you see you know and you can use panning and I found decent sized nuggets panning over the years and and I even found some pretty coarse gold in places of course these were all places that are known to produce course called I've found nuggets in the bedrock just with my eyeballs but what I recommend is a metal detector because there's a kind of placer deposit that was hard for the old-timers to work and because they didn't have a metal detector but is a lot better for us to work because we have good metal detectors that work to find gold nuggets and that's called a residual placer these are places where maybe under the surface of the soil are the little kinds of bail it's like I showed you that tend to have coarse gold in them the little tiny vein lets that tend to produce the coarse gold it may not be a big vein that outcrops or even a vein large enough to have a commercial operation but in the soil shedding down off these things will be residual gold that can be found with a metal detector sometimes if you have a hard rock mine that produced some coarse gold down the hill slope from the mine because everything erodes downhill you know water washes stuff down and it works its way down the hill until it gets into a stream and then on out the stream into the river and eventually to the ocean the hill slopes below some of these mines are great places to take a look with your metal detector but my favorite is the residual placer you can a lot of times see these they're shallow workings sometimes in California and other places they were worked where they had water they used a technique called ground sluicing where they would literally have you know they work basically with with low pressure water and washed off maybe the top three to five sometimes even 10 or 12 feet but a lot of times three four five six feet was all day washed off the surface and they would pile there rocks and the the gold was as they washed the material off they use shovels to help it along and they put it into sluice boxes and that's how they captured the coarse gold but areas that produce this residual goal that had these grounds loose workings are great places to take your metal detector and find some coarse gold I certainly have had great luck with them with working that type of working I did mention around old hard rock mines I'm not encourage you to go in them but the slope downhill is a good place to work too and a lot of times where there were known pockets and rich areas that the miners worked you can go in there with a metal detector and if you see any kind of bits of quartz that are shedding down the hill those may be the sign of a small vein that doesn't outcrop that's too small and too weak to stick up above the surface and for the old-timers to see it and that little bit of vein quartz chunks of vein quartz coming down the side of the hill may indicate that there's a buried hidden vein there and you'll want to check that area with your metal detector now of course there's a whole lot more little veins that don't produce gold than ones that produce pockets and even some of the ones that produce pockets if they're if any length they'll produce a pocket here but hey not over there and here too there might only be fifty feet you might have a good pocket here at 50 feet over nothing so be sure and follow those zones where there's significant quartz pieces in the soil check them out with your metal detector those can be great places for you to find your fine gold with your metal detector find good P good coarse gold nuggets and that's what you want to have success and you can do it yourself well I hope you've enjoyed this presentation on coarse gold and the geology that it takes the form coarse gold it's a kind of gold you can find with a metal detector and you know if you watching this you probably want to be the best prospector you can and to help people be better prospectors to learn to find more well I wrote a book called Fistful of gold because that's what I want you to be able to get is to go out and get a fistful of gold well I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my book right now okay so I wanted to tell you a little bit more about my book I wanted to be able to share the knowledge that I've gained about finding gold and and how to be successful and so I spent years literally writing this book Fistful of gold it's more than 350 pages long which is why I say it's an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about finding your own gold I've sold more than eight thousand copies and I've got a lot of really great feedback on it it just is the most complete book on the market it has information about finding gold that literally is not available in any other book that you're gonna find four prospectors because I took technical stuff from geologists and other mineral scientists and I've translated that into language that the average guy can understand you don't need a PhD to go out and find gold but the information that scientists have learned over recent decades can can be of a lot of help to people so it's in this book if you're interested about finding gold panning sluicing nugget detecting dry washing the geology of gold deposits and how they form it's all in here and like I say it's more than 350 pages long so if you'll just go to the description underneath this video you can take a look I've got a link in there to take you to Amazon to the site where the book is sold and I think you'll you'll really enjoy it take take a look at all the people who've commented on this and have really liked the book it has a very very high rating for a book and also I have a website my own free website that you can take a look at I've got all kinds of information on here about doing research and how to find gold a lot of good information stuff that basically couldn't fit into my book and so I put it on this website and I have a link also for that in the video description so take a look in the description and you can click on the link and it'll take you to my website and finally if you like this presentation I've got a lot more coming out here's a three and a half ounces of gold that I found a couple years back in one area I've got a lot more of these videos coming on gold gemstones hardrock placer a lot of metal detecting there'll be lots of metal detecting stuff so if you really enjoyed this click the subscribe button and then take the notification bell off and YouTube will let you know when I publish new stuff and hit the like button as well and please comment on these videos because I'm interested in what you have to say and I promise to answer any questions you have so if you are wondering about anything you're thinking maybe I didn't cover something thoroughly enough in a video then let me know and I'll be happy to try and help you out and give you whatever information you need so thanks a lot and I hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 55,368

Rating: 4.8694706 out of 5

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Id: fhIJdj6NbBY

Length: 39min 4sec (2344 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019