How to Find the Gold Motherlode

in 1848 in the small Californian town of Coloma along the American River James Marshall was digging a trench for a waterwheel to power his lumber mill when he made an extraordinary discovery he was digging it down during the day and then using water at night to flush out the sand and gravel and he looked and there on the bedrock for a couple of gold nuggets rumors of California's River gold spread like wildfire by 18-49 over 90,000 people from around the world descended on the state nicknamed the 49ers these early investigators searched the streams in a bid to find their fortunes their first challenge was to figure out where gold accumulates in the river and they quickly discovered that gold wasn't just strewn anywhere along its course a clue to where the gold would be concentrated it's black sand in areas like this take a sample and pan it out the 49ers soon learned if they found heavy black sand in their pan they were on to a winner the process of panning is a simple one you're really trying to separate light materials from heavy material in this sluggish water the heavy particles sink to the bottom of the pan and you repeat the process of washing away light materials and then concentrating the heavies on the bottom until you get down to just the black stand and hopefully some nice goal even a small nugget like that in the same way rivers and streams separate the heavy particles from the light the gold and black sand are flushed downstream but as they hit the sluggish water on the inner bend they drop out of the flow and it's here in the sandbanks on the inside bends of the river that the 49ers discovered an absolute fortune in total over 20 million ounces of river gold were discovered in the waterways of California but when they investigated the valley sides above the river the 49ers discovered an even bigger stash of gold and they wondered what was the deal with these gold deposits that were up and away from the water they took a close look at him and they could see that these boulders were round and smooth these rounded boulders are identical to those found in the rivers nearby and the reason is because it's an ancient riverbed it's been left high and dry by the flow of the river the river cuts downward and leaves these deposits behind the miners continued to explore and they found some just above the river like this but they found other's hands and even hundreds even a thousand feet above the modern stream using powerful water jets the forty niners blasted and flushed out a further 50 million ounces of ancient river gold from california's hills which still bear the scars over 150 years later similar River gold deposits have formed all over the world including the greatest treasure trove ever found Witwatersrand in South Africa its discovery in 1886 caused another massive gold rush but this river gold is not found on the surface miners must descend over two miles down the deepest mineshaft on earth half the goal in this planet has been produced from that one group of deposits most geologists believe that these unique deposits formed from ancient river systems concentrating these in old river gravels over millions of years thousands of ancient rivers carrying gold spilled into a huge lake dumping a massive gold deposit this ancient lake bed is now buried miles underground to date with waters rand has produced over 1.4 billion ounces of gold worth over 1 and a half trillion dollars and geologists believe the same value of gold still remains untouched in the search for California's River gold 49ers found heavy blacks and a sign that gold is deposited on the inside Bend of a river and gold buried beneath rounded boulders in the valley walls proof that rivers have been depositing gold for millions of years the 49ers suspected that rivers were carrying gold down from a source somewhere in the mountain the mother lode but the quest to understand where this mother lode gold originated would take geologists deep inside the earth and face-to-face with some of the most destructive powers on the planet in the 19th century the 49ers plucked 70 million ounces of river gold from California's streams and ancient riverbeds valued at more than 80 billion dollars but this easy goal didn't last the race was on to find the source of the river gold the mother lode and they set off into the mountains to investigate and this is what the old-timers were really looking for a big wide vein of quartz filled with gold it runs literally for miles through the countryside they were able to mine millions of ounces of gold from sources just like this with the discovery of mother lode gold prospecting changed from a solo quest to big business hundreds of mines sprung up all over California employing thousands of men discovering what geological force had concentrated gold in California's mountains was a puzzle that would bamboozle scientists for decades in 1853 the Allegheny mine opened in ceará County California today it's over 3,300 feet deep with over 40 miles of tunnels all leading to one special slice of rock in the mountain here I am in the middle of the mother lode vein it must be about 40 feet thick and it goes down half a mile into the earth this is the gold-bearing quartz vein that the miners were seeking quartz forms from a liquid and as it solidifies it's somehow traps lumps of gold inside it it is loaded with gold if we break these quartz veins open though we can see perhaps small amounts of gold within the quartz this is just an amazing piece of quartz you can see all the free golden and it's just bright and glistens there are actually clues to how the gold got here within the quartz that was deposited with the gold trapped inside the quartz are tiny bubbles of fluid they are minut remnants of a stream of water and minerals that once gushed up this vein analysis of these fluid bubbles has revealed the extreme conditions that created the gold seam that gold was deposited at 600 degrees Fahrenheit it was a very very hot fluid that brought the gold and the quartz to this location and deposited the vein but it was a mystery what was the driving force creating all this hot fluid which carried the gold in an old quarry nearby lies a clue when the old-timer saw rocks like this they would get excited they knew they were getting close to the source of the gold they would see these rocks had changed their color and then they would get to the big mother lode quartz named the source of most of the gold ore this quartz vein is sandwiched between these altered rocks and looking at these altered rocks you see they're all deformed they're up on end they're sheared up they're broken they're folded these veins run for hundreds of miles in a north-south direction similar sandwiches of gold quartz and broken Rock are found along the entire length of California and strangely they all run parallel to the coast whatever immense force shattered these rocks must also have created the hot fluid which carried and concentrated the gold but what was it geologists finally solve the mystery in the 1950s when the revolutionary theory of plate tectonics shed light upon how California and its mountains were made they discovered that beneath the Pacific Ocean a giant plate of the Earth's crust moved eastwards it plowed into the American continent crumbling huge slabs of the seafloor as it went if this big rock is ancient North America over the last 300 million years we had a spreading ocean floor pushed the ocean and sediments on top of the ocean against North America and stacked these pieces of ocean floor and sediments on ocean floor up on end against western North America California was pushed above the waves a mountainous mass of crushed crumpled and upended rocks separated by huge cracks running deep into the crust creating a landscape compiled of giant slabs stacked parallel to the coast this immense mountain building process also had the power to create a piping hot fluid buried rocks were squashed under unbearable pressure they superheated and a 600 degree fluid was squeezed from like water running in a river this piping hot fluid had the ability to concentrate the scattered gold as it washed through the rock it leached out my new particles of gold creating a mineral rich soup it poured into the giant cracks which pipelined it to the surface as the fluid cooled the gold coagulated and the quartz crystallized forming a solid gold bearing quartz vein in total 35 million ounces of this mountain gold were blasted out of California one of the most profitable gold mining areas of its time wherever you have oceanic plates colliding with the edge of a continent you're always going to create fluid you're always going to move those trace amounts of gold and that will get focused into major faults to form large load gold deposits that part of the mountain building process similar gold-bearing quartz veins lie beneath the coastal mountains all around the Pacific Rim where the ocean floor has crumbled under gigantic earth forces scientists investigating how California's mountain gold formed have found ancient fluid bubbles proof that a hot liquid deposited the quartz and gold parallel beds of broken altered rock evidence that the goldrich fluid was squeezed from rocks as mountains formed by the 1880s only 30 years after the first gold strike California's Mountain Gold became increasingly difficult to find by then gold hunters in neighboring Nevada had stumbled upon an entirely different type of gold deposit but it was the sort of deposit that could drive men to murder in the 19th century 49ers found 70 million ounces of River gold then they began to ransack the motherlode blasting out over 35 million ounces of mountain gold squeezed from the rocks as California formed for many years scientists believe that only the colossal forces that created mountains had the power to concentrate gold scattered throughout the rocks but gold strikes made in neighboring Nevada were to shatter this theory massive gold veins were found in the sagebrush hills of the desert a tidal wave of gold hunters left California heading east the almost uncharted desolate state of Nevada began to light up with life as gold strikes were made across the high desert this was the gun slinging Wild West and the rough mining town of Bodie had one of the toughest reputations it's hard to imagine more than 8,500 people help along this stretch here lawlessness lots of fights breaking out lots of saloons opium dens and brothels it was said that a man a day was killed in boating and some historians believe the fickle geology of these gold deposits may have played a part in this murder rate here the veins were much more segmented and broken up so while one miner might be mining along on the vein another miner might not be which would lead to animosity and tension an occasional fight

Channel: brandon hart

Views: 688,794

Rating: 4.6987367 out of 5

Keywords: how, gold, was, formed, war, television show, commercial, way, spot, always, reality, you, advertisement, dame, perfume, gotta, out, live, easy, own, variety, golden, forever, your, back, treasure, way out, always love, own way, easy way, way back, valcano, erupt

Id: FzT0k1cuDWE

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2012