What does gold look like in rocks_ Gold bearing rock identification.

hi I'm Chris Ralph and hey have you ever wondered what raw natural gold looks like in the rock what what gold ore looks like you know where do they recover all this gold that's mined in different places across the world if you've ever wondered what raw gold ore looks like then you've come to the right spot you've got the right video because I'm going to show you all kinds of specimens of rich gold ore and different kinds of gold ores from all over the world together were some of the stories on behind some of them and some of the stories are kind of interesting just in and of themselves now the people who worked in this building behind me way back in the day back in the early 1900's they knew what gold ore looked like they knew what or was because that's an or sorting house they actually took rock from a mine here at Tonopah Nevada and they sorted it out and they would put the waste in one pile and the good or in another you see they sorted this is some waste rock and they got rid of that this is the ore that kept that and you seeds up the giant pile over there that pile is actually the pile of waste that was left behind and underneath that building there was actually a train track that ran through there and they could load up the train cars with the ore and then they would take the ore to be processed at a mill and the gold and the silver extracted from it so let's get started now we're gonna start a series of slides a slide show showing you all kinds of examples of what gold ore looks like so that you can learn how to spot gold ore because the truth is if you're someplace and you walk by some gold ore and don't notice it it could cost you thousands if not even millions of dollars because the guy who found this stuff here in Tonopah who found this he walked by here and he recognized that this was rich gold ore or rich actually rich gold and silver ore and he took it to an assayer and the ass there didn't want to run it because he looked out and said that just junk and so knowing the difference between gold ore and not gold ore and junk livre right you know stuff that you should leave her right there or leave it behind is important to know especially if you like to be out in the outdoors and that sort of thing so stay tuned we'll go out and check out what gold ore really looks like here we go okay so now we're gonna take a look at a whole lot of different specimens of gold ore to teach you what gold ore really looks like what does gold in Rock in its native original state really look like well we're gonna take a look at a whole different whole bunch of different examples and get a feel for that and I'll try and teach you so that you too can get a feel for this now look at what this guy's holding he's holding a chunk of super-rich gold ore the gold of course is the metal the yellow metal you can see in the white is quartz and quartz and gold are very commonly associated but not always and we're gonna talk about that too but this piece that this guy's holding now you look at it it's maybe the size of a good-sized cantaloupe right and cantaloupe weighs a couple of pounds well this chunk of gold is gonna weigh maybe 15 or 20 pounds simply because gold is so very dense I mean literally this guy he's holding a smallish piece that fits in his two hands and yet this is probably more than $50,000 worth of gold and that's not from any specimen value but merely the richness of the gold and the amount of gold and the specimen that he's having that he's holding is gonna be something like I say north of 50 grand u.s. here's another specimen of gold and again the white material is quartz this gold is much shinier and it's in thin sheets this is often called leaf gold because of course leaves are thin and cheat like and so this is an example of leaf gold it's also from Australia just as the first specimen the guy holding a specimen that was from a recent find in Australia this is some more material from that same recent mind only you can see this chunk is big enough that they had to put it on a pallet it's not something that a guy could hold in his hands and yet it's just filled with gold the total find on this fine that they made here in the last six or eight months was reputed to be worth millions I mean literally they found several million dollars worth a very high-grade gold ore like this some of which will be sold for specimens and some of which I'm sure will be crushed and and the gold extracted from the ore and then melted down now here is a much smaller specimen this is from California and this gold I mentioned we we took an example look at leaf gold a few seconds ago this is crystalline gold and you can see that triangular shapes there that that the gold has this is basically a shape where it's like a pyramid on the top and a pyramid upside down on the bottom it's a diamond kind of shape it's actually the same kind of shape that diamonds crystallized in and you recognized that the diamond shape on playing cards only this is of course that diamond shape in a full three dimension but this kind of specimen the guy who found this he found several specimens with it and made a lot of money because this type of stuff this crystalline gold sells for much more than the the gold value of it it sells to collectors and stuff who who prized this sort of material now the gray white kind of material is quartz as I mentioned is very commonly associated with gold the rusty red Brown is iron so this is is it looks like rust because well it's the same thing as rust it's iron sites that's what rust is made of so this is basically some rust some quartz and some really beautiful gold now here's another very valuable specimen this is gold but it's in a very fine dendritic type of a shape I mean literally these little pieces are just you know sixteenth or a smaller of an inch long and they're paper-thin you could take this this gold and just mash it up because it's thinner than oil yet it's this is also a piece with very high value because of its crystalline nature and the white material here is not quartz as you might guess instead this white material is a zeolite it's a different kind of a mineral and the green mineral in the background is chloride and at this deposit which is about 30 miles from Moreno in Nevada is a unique kind of a deposit of gold in the zeolite and yet as I mentioned gold is mostly found in quartz or at least a lot of times it's found in quartz and here's a few examples of quartz filled with gold that a guy found with a metal detector the one on the far right is iron stained and so has that rusty orange kind of color and the others are wider versions of quartz pure quartz that that have gold shot through various little cracks and crevices in the quartz and this is just how it formed literally the the nature of how gold deposits like this form is that often the late in the life of the formation of the vane and the rock I mean the literally these form from hot waters that have gold in them flowing through cracks or faults in the rock and as the quartz as it forms the first usually the quartz is laid down or originally and then late in the life of this formation of the vein the gold is injected to the city into the system and so it tends to feel little cracks and crevices like this here is it another example this is thinner more leaf like gold but also injected into cracks and crevices in the white quartz this is from the mother lode country in northern California now if gold goes through the quartz and the quartz is fairly solid it's not too cracked up and messed up you can actually saw they leave these gold quartz specimens and they actually take this material and cut and make jewelry out of it and if you look closely in a lot of the jewelry stores they will put material like this of course not just cut into slabs like this but they will take this material and cut and polish and make a gem out of it and put it in a ring or a pendant or something like that now sometimes like I say the rock is very fractured and as you can see in this piece there's gold all through white quartz but the the quartz is so fractured that you could probably take this piece with your hands and and break it up although it might be more difficult than it looks it's it's very highly fractured this quartz this white quartz is but that is gold shot all through that quartz filling in all the little cracks and nooks and crannies that were left toward the end of the formation of the vein here's an actual bit of quartz still in place in the vein in the side of a mine this kind of stuff can be found with metal detectors and that can be very rich and really worth a lot of money and people who find stuff like this definitely make a lot of money doing so now here's the specimen this is from the Philippines the last one the the gold in the vein in place was from Northern California from the California Gold Country but this piece is from a quartz vein in the Philippines and you can see the gold shot through it kind of again occupying the little spaces in the little holes in the quartz here's a piece that was found in Arizona this piece was found with a metal detector and you can see the blue on it the blue is copper mineralization and it's not unusual that a quartz vein that that forms with gold we'll also have some other metals with it and sometimes those other metals include copper and if the copper minerals oxidized like the the iron did in the other example that I showed you the copper will oxidize and form usually blue and green kinds of stains instead of the orange II red brick red kind of color that you expect from rust now here's a couple of specimens of gold or natural gold or from a place called gold field in Nevada and gold field was very famous for producing large amounts of super rich material like this a lot of this material has more than an ounce of gold in a pound of the rock and you can see the gold all shot through here the gold is actually in very tiny pieces even though you can certainly see its coloration there in the rock here's a chunk of gold-bearing quartz from Australia this was also picked up with a metal detector and the piece originally was completely covered with that rusty red orange kind of color that you see on the side of the rock it was come the rock was completely covered with that because it was covered with this clay that had this color but the guy who found it you know the metal detector sounded off and he struck it with a hammer and sure enough there was the metallic gold on the inside you can see it on the lower left of the specimen there now sometimes gold is very fine I've shown shown you a lot of specimens that have huge amounts of gold in them the last one you know had some gold it's still pretty rich rock yeah that chunk from Australia this piece is from Russia and you can see that the gold is just kind of like smeared on the side of the rock it's not very big pieces and in fact honestly a lot of gold ore is mined today that has in fact almost all gold ore mined today has less than a half an ounce of gold in a ton of rock and and you can think about that for a minute you know think how small a half an ounce is think something like maybe a 50-cent piece anyways there are more or less around a half an ounce and then compare that to a ton of rock which would you know a huge amount so in most gold mines work rock that contains less than a half an ounce per ton of rock some of them working on one tenth of an ounce some even a few hundredths of an ounce per ton of rock so it's unusual to have the super rich specimens that I've been showing you here but ones like this that have just a little bit of gold in them is more common here's another piece from Canada that has just a few little specks of gold in it and you can see if you look closely in the rock there's a few little golden specks there and B to be honest this is good rich or even though it has it just a few specks in a hand specimen like this if you added up all those specimens all those little specks in a ton of rock well then you might have an ounce or so of this gold the little specks and an ounce of gold in a ton of rock well an ounce of gold as I'm recording this is just shy of $1,300 u.s. and so you know $1,300 in a ton of rock is pretty good and in fact in all honesty most mining operations the cost to mine and extract the gold that's in a ton of rock that varies from anything from maybe fifteen dollars at the very cheapest up to a hundred hundred and fifty dollars and so you can see even if it costs you a hundred and fifty dollars to extract all the gold in a ton of rock if you had more than a thousand dollars worth of gold in that rock and that ton of rock then you would be doing very well and a lot of mines produce many many hundreds of tons of rock a day some produce literally that did ones that run on the big trucks and a very large grand scale can produce tens of thousands of tons of rock in a day so you know they may only make ten or twenty or thirty dollars a ton but by processing 10,000 tons a day they're doing pretty good so here is what really a lot of common quartz looks like and this is probably decent or although I don't know what the testing of it revealed but this is from the mother lode country in California in Mariposa County and you can look at this rock and see it's stained rusty colored from from iron present in the rock and it's stained black from manganese and you don't really see any obvious gold there's probably a few specks here and they're spread through the rock but like I say a ton of this rock may be well worth processing and so you know just because a rock looks like this and you don't see a lot of visible gold that doesn't mean you haven't made a strike of valuable gold or it it sometimes doesn't reveal itself very easily and a test is necessary to to determine how much gold is in the rock the other thing that people do is people see this this white vein courts and some a lot of white vein courts it doesn't have enough gold in it to be worth processing just because you find some white quartz in a vein it doesn't mean it's it's particularly valuable the truth is that quartz is made of silicon and oxygen and those are the two most common elements in the Earth's crust so if you put together the two most common elements you end up with quartz and that really you know by itself this so quartz is pretty common in fact it's probably the most common mineral on the surface of the earth and just because it occurs in the vein doesn't mean it's rich with gold but sometimes it is now this is I've shown you mostly pieces of quartz with gold in it and now we're going to take a look at some other things that look a little bit different this is some super-rich gold and silver ore from California odda this is actually from the Comstock Lode up at Virginia City in western Nevada and the dark gray minerals are a combination of various base metals such as zinc and lead and maybe a little copper in there and those are valuable in their own rights but this or the widest quartz and it has quite a bit of silver and gold in it and so this or there was huge amounts of this or extracted in the old days up at Virginia City and a lot of money made by taking the gold and silver and sometimes the base metals out of it too now this is us the kind of ore in perhaps the one of the richest deposits on the entire planet this is from the Witwatersrand in south africa this is the south african or that was mine for years it literally is what geologists call a conglomerate those rounded pieces of quartz were once pebbles in a gravel and the gravel had gold in it and it was eventually buried and heated and over time the heat and pressure actually moved the gold around a little bit in that gravel but it also turned the gravel into a solid rock called a conglomerate and this material was mined and a lot of money made off of that for hi my dear I'm recording a thing right now so okay I'll be another twenty minutes maybe so so this is a very special kind of or called a conglomerate and this is what they produce in South Africa South Africa has produced tremendous amounts of ore and gold within the last oh I think they started mining it seriously in that 1880s or something like that and they still mined it too deep underground in super deep shafts this type of rock is called a conglomerate and you can see the rounded pieces those are quartz the rounded pieces were once pebbles in a gravel this was a gravel bed and the gravel bed had gold in it and it was eventually buried and deep deep underground and subject to heat and pressure and was so much heat and pressure that the gold that was actually in the gravels kind of moved around a little bit and redeposited but there are certain layers of this conglomerate in South Africa that are rich with gold and miners dig this out by in huge amounts and process it and extract the gold and like I say since the 1880s the country of South Africa mining whore that looks a lot like this has produced tons and tons of gold this is another usual type of whore this is the kind of ore that they mined in Nevada at the karlon type mines you can see it doesn't look like much of anything it just looks like an ordinary rock unless except that it contains a little bit more than a tenth of an ounce of gold per ton and they didn't discover these deposits they they found a few of them in other places in Nevada beginning in the 1930s but the Carlin Trend the Karlin area were saw many millions of tons of this material had been mine and so many tons of gold has been produced wasn't actually discovered until the 1960s because prospectors in the 1800s that were all through here didn't recognize this as being gold or there's a couple of problems with it as being a gold ore why they didn't recognize it one is if you were to crush this rock and pan it which is what old-time miners commonly did to test their hoard they were crushed down a sample and then process it in their gold pan to see what the heavy elements were if you did that with this material because the gold is literally microscopic in size the pieces are teeny tiny you wouldn't have anything in your pan and so even geologists that went looking for this it took them years to figure out where this stuff was once they figured it out though they kind of got the hang of it and another way of testing that was common in the 1800s is testing by what they call a fire assay where they literally put the material in they crush it up and put it in with a flux that melts the whole thing and collect it into a lead button and then collect the gold out of the lead button that process would does show it shows it perfectly well that it's a gold ore but no one from the 1800's ever paid to take a sample of this and crush it down and process it by fire assay but anyway this is something that is a very rich ore and a lot of mining companies mine tens of thousands of of this everyday here's another unusual high-grade gold ore it does have some sulfides in it you can see the metallic looking material and minerals in some of these pieces of rock but this is a special gold ore from a volcanic deposit at Gold field I remember remember I showed you the little specimen of gold field or that had the visible gold even though this doesn't have a lot of visible gold in it it does contain quite a bit of gold and it was very rich very high-grade ore that was mined at golf Ile Nevada and actually gold field produced about five million ounces of gold over its it's history between its discovery in the early 1900s and about 1950 here's another unusual type of gold ore and in fact there's a story with this this material was mined in a mine in the 1960s and underneath there was a layer of this dark-colored rusty colored material and underneath it was some rich copper ore well they mined this dark rusty material and threw it away in the dump because they wanted to get to the copper ore that was underneath it no one bothered to test this stuff and find that it was rich in gold and in fact it's what's called a gossin this is a gossin type of material it is basically pyrite or iron sulfide which is also called fool's gold and eventually after it rusts and rusts and decays and decrepit eighths and everything it ends up like this but the gold is still in it and so there was originally some gold in it and there still is and yet geologists who mined this stuff and miners took this material from a mine in the 1960s and threw it away not knowing that there was gold in it they threw it away to get to the copper that was underneath so here is that mineral I just mentioned pyrite this looks yellow it looks metallic but it's you know a perfect cube but this is not gold this is pyrite it's a mineral that's a combination of iron and sulfur and it does make some good specimens that beautiful specimen like this you can see the price that was for sale for was $550 so you know it can't have value as a pretty mineral specimen and sometimes it even has a gold in it and it's often associated with gold ores so just because you find fool's gold pyrite doesn't mean that you're a failure because sometimes they occur together and in fact sometimes it's even hard to tell them apart here's a specimen you can see it has some a yellowish greenish kind of colored mineral in quartz this is a quartz vein material and yet this much mineral is pyrite if you look closely you can see some cubic shapes some squares like the the one weird the example we were just looking at you can see some squares in this specimen that show that yes it's not gold it's pyrite and yet gold and pyrite often occur together and sometimes there can actually be little teensy tiny specks dust literally of gold inside the pyrite crystal here's some more examples of that cubic shape you can see the the rusty Brown now this is what happens when the pyrite oxidizes you remember I showed you the Gaussian material that was dark and rusty Brown and this is the same thing only this these specimens that you can see have retained that the cubic shape of the original pyrite crystal whereas the Ghazni material that we looked at a few seconds ago a little bit ago did not have that nice cubic shape to it but it because it's iron and sulfur when it's exposed to air and water it will rust just like iron metal and basically the sulfur comes out of it and what you're left with is the same thing that you have on the surface of a rusty old nail it's iron oxides a combination of iron and oxygen and a little bit of water and like I say sometimes it's hard to tell because the gold and the pyrite occur together here's a specimen where the pyrite is partly rusted you can still see a little bit of the yellow-green kind of color to some of it but you can also see the bright yellow unroasted gold that's associated with it so sometimes just because you find a piece of pyrite it doesn't mean that there isn't gold with it as well another thing that fools miners is this stuff and I got a better picture for it this is what's called a Telluride mineral and here's a close-up of Telluride this is a combination of gold and the mineral tellurium it's a mineral called calleb there right and it sometimes fools miners because miners would see this and think oh it's just some sulfur mineral and not worry about it and yet these little crystals that you see are at least more or less about almost half gold by weight I will usually contain some silver and some other things too but there's a considerable gold just in the in that caliber right and so if you find this type of stuff then it can be very valuable but it often fooled miners and here's some examples of calibre right in or from the Cripple Creek district in Colorado this was something that the miner fooled the miners at first but they quickly learned that this tellurium is a natural combination or this caliber ID is a natural combination of gold and tellurium and that the gold can relatively easily be extracted from it here's another sample from a mine in Montana that has the it has a little bit of Telluride in in the vein which is a quartz and calcite which is the white material there now this is a specimen from Nevada and shows a little bit of copper now one of the things I wanted to point out with this is that it doesn't look you know just to look at this picture with your eye you don't really see any obvious gold but if you take a magnifying glass and look very carefully at the rock at some of the little cracks and crevices sure enough there's little pieces of visible gold in this specimen and some of them are actually right in and around look where the copper is so a lot of times the gold in gold bearing veins can be very small and isn't always being in course like the first pictures I showed you sometimes the gold in a quartz vein is teeny-tiny and hard to see without magnification here's another specimen from gold field like I say that district in Nevada that produced about five million ounces of gold this is another example of high-grade ore from golf field it has some various sulfides in it some of which they're pyrite that's rusted and you can see the rusty color there but the gold in this is very very very fine it's hard to see but yet this district like I say produced about five million ounces and of course Karlin the gold is is even too small to see with a handheld microscope it takes a more powerful microscope to see the gold in that Carla norm now gold veins can occur right in the rock here's an example of a little bit of a gold vein that was right in a road cut and I took a picture of this because the main cuts right through this road cut sometimes all you see the expression of a vein just maybe a pile rubley courts like this you know just a pile of loose courts that's eroded and dropped off a vein that's buried in in the gravel in inside if you were to dig down here you would certainly hit the quartz vein that is the source of all this quartz rock and and this this vein does contain some gold not huge amounts but it did definitely contain some gold now I mentioned that there are mines where they mined tens of thousands of tons a day and and this is the kind of mine this is a mine in Nevada that I took some pictures of I got to go visit and they were literally digging huge truffles and you know if you were to stand next to one of the big rubber tires here those tires are about 12 feet tall they're gigantic they're taller than you are so these mines work and extract gold on a very very large scale and the amount of gold in the rock is relatively small but they process huge amounts and they do it at a very low cost and so they're able to make money mining this low-grade ore on a high-volume basis now there are still mines like this the sixteen to one mine in Allegheny California that produced some rich or you know that it's they're still out there and they're still working this mine and some of the examples that I showed you at the beginning were pictures from for rich rich gold ore from the sixteen to one mine so you know it's still out there and and there's still people doing this and and it's still a worthwhile job but also a lot of people find rich gold ore with metal detectors by going through old areas old mining areas here's a beautiful specimen that was found with a metal detector that contains a number of ounces of gold and the guy who was metal detecting there and and ran into this piece and he was very pleased to find it some other specimens that were found by a guy with a metal detector pieces of quartz shot through with rich gold or another specimen beautiful golden quartz these pieces have some real value and then this one was also found with a metal detector here's a piece with gold shot through it that I found where the metal detector it's a beautiful piece of quartz with some nice gold in it now sometimes like my piece where there's not a lot of gold showing the people if they want to produce a better specimen we'll take and put the quartz in an acid there's a specific kind of acid that will dissolve port but leave gold behind now this acid is pretty dangerous in fact it's among the more dangerous kinds of acid out there so I'm not actually going to mention the name of it but you can see that this piece the quartz has been kind of eaten away showing the gold that was within it better and in fact you can actually eat all of the quartz away and leave nothing but the gold behind if you have enough of that acid this is the kind of thing you end up with if you eat basically all the gold out this was a fine with a metal detector in Arizona and this is many pounds of gold and of course many many dollars worth of gold so you can see that the binding natural gold can be very profitable and I hope you enjoyed this presentation because I'm gonna go ahead and throw it back to myself and finish up this video okay so now you've had a chance to see a whole lot of different specimens of gold ore from super rich stuff with lots of visible gold to other things that just don't look like much and may have cost a lot of people a lot of money that walked right by it because they couldn't recognize it the bottom line is you really need to sample sampling is a critical part of finding gold ore because just eyeballing it you might say like the assayer who didn't want to test this stuff and thereby lost out he lost out on millions and millions of dollars that he would have made if you would have tested it so testing is important and one of the ways that old-timers used to test would they'd actually crush a sample of gold ore down to powder and then pan it in a gold pan that's how they would tell but even that loses a lot of gold there's the number of ores the round that that have lots of gold in them but if you crush it and pan it you won't see it because it's microscopic or super super small you might never notice it so learn to see gold ores and recognize things and learn to sample things that might be you have any inkling that it might be gold ore it's important to sample I hope you've enjoyed this video and I have one final message for you so also I want to mention my book Fistful of gold if you have more interest in learning about how to find gold and be successful as a prospector this is the source that you want to check out basically my book is an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about prospecting from panning sluicing metal detecting dry washing to geology of gold and even how to stake a claim it's basically everything you need to know about prospecting and it's available now on Amazon you just go to Amazon and look for a fistful of gold by Chris Rothman I guarantee you'll find it also I have my own website man that's course free and for more free information just go to Nevada outback Gems calm slash prospect slash Chris prospect HTM that's the girl for it and it's got all kinds of information about prospecting and mining and the whole thing everything you wanted to know including some great history and locations of where you might want to prospect for gold and finally if you like this presentation and you want to learn more about finding your own goal I promise that I've got quite a few more gold silver and gemstone videos coming that are on the way a lot of exciting and interesting stuff both in the form of live-action videos as well as slide presentations so be sure to click the subscribe button and the notification Bell and YouTube will let you know when I publish new stuff and hit the like button as well and feel free to comment or ask questions and I promise to do my very best to answer any of your questions as best I can so thanks a lot and hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you again soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 122,297

Rating: 4.8652291 out of 5

Keywords: raw gold, natural gold ore, gold rock identification

Id: cGz_hTdiCco

Length: 40min 23sec (2423 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019