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

look

s like in

rock

? What

gold

ore

look

s like. Do you know where they recover all this gold that is extracted in different places around the world? If you've ever wondered.

what

does

raw gold ore look like then you have come to the right place you have the right video because I will show you all kinds of rich gold ore specimens and different types of gold ores from all over the world together There were some of the stories behind some of them and some of the stories are quite interesting in themselves.

Now, the people who worked on this building behind me back in the day, in the early 1900s, knew what gold ore was like. like they knew what it was because it's a sorting house, they actually took

rock

from a mine here in Tonopah Nevada and sorted it and put the waste in one pile and the good stuff or another, you see, they sorted this is some waste rock and they got rid of that, this is the ore that held that and you plant 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 went through there and they could load the train cars with the ore and then they would take the ore to process it in a mill and extract the gold and silver from it, so let's start now, we're going to start a series of slides, a slideshow. showing you all kinds of examples of what gold ore looks like so you can learn how to spot it because the truth is if you are somewhere and you walk past a gold ore and don't notice it, it could cost you thousands of dollars if you Ni not even millions of dollars because the guy who found this stuff here in Tonopah, who found this, came by here and recognized that it was a rich gold ore or, actually, a rich gold and silver ore, and he took it to a rehearser and the ass from there. he didn't want to run it because he looked and said it was just junk, so knowing the difference between gold ore and non-gold ore and junk pound, you know things that you should leave right there or leave behind, it's important to know. especially if you like being outdoors and that kind of stuff, so stay tuned, we'll go out and check out what gold ore really looks like.

Here we go, okay, now we're going to take a look at a bunch of different gold ore specimens to show you what gold ore really looks like. What

does

gold actually look like in rock in its original state? Well, let's take a look at a bunch of different examples and get a feel for it. and I will try to teach you so that you can also have an idea of ​​this. Now look what this guy is holding. It has a piece of super rich gold ore. Gold, of course, is the metal, the yellow metal that you can see in it. white is quartz and quartz and gold are very commonly associated, but not always and we're going to talk about that too, but this piece that this guy is holding, now that you look at it, it's maybe the size of a good sized melon. , and the melon weighs a couple of pounds, well, this piece of gold will weigh maybe 15 or 20 pounds simply because gold is so dense.

I'm literally talking about this guy holding a smaller piece that fits in both of his hands and yet this thing is probably worth over $50,000 in gold. and that is not due to the value of the specimen, but simply to the richness of the gold and the amount of gold and the specimen you have will be something like I say north of 50 thousand dollars. Here is another gold specimen and again the white material is quartz. This gold is much brighter and is in thin sheets. This is often called gold leaf because of course the leaves are thin and trap-like, so this is an example of gold leaf.

He is also from Australia. Like the first specimen, the guy holding a specimen that was from a recent find in Australia, this is a little bit more material from that same recent mind, only you can see that this chunk is big enough for They had to put it on a platform, it's not something a man could hold in his hands and yet it's full of gold. The total discovery of 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 with a very high value. quality gold ore like this, some of which will be sold as specimens and some, I am sure, will be crushed and the gold extracted from the ore and then smelted.

Here is a much smaller specimen, this one is from California and this one gold. I mentioned we took an example, look at the gold leaf a few seconds ago, this is crystalline gold and you can see the triangular shapes that the gold has. This is basically a shape where it's like a pyramid on top and a pyramid upside down. at the bottom there is a kind of diamond shape, it's actually the same kind of shape that diamonds crystallize in and you recognized that the diamond shape on the playing cards only this is of course the diamond shape in three dimensions complete, but this type of specimen the guy Whoever found this, found several specimens with it and made a lot of money because this type of thing, this crystalline gold, sells for much more than the value of the gold.

It is sold to collectors and things that value this type of material. Now the gray. The white type of material is quartz, as I mentioned it is very commonly associated with gold, the rusty red brown is iron so it looks like rust because well it's the same as rust, it's iron sites, that's what it's made of the rust, so this is basically it. some rust, some quartz and some really beautiful gold, now here's another very valuable specimen, this one is gold, but it's a very fine dendritic shape, I mean literally these little pieces are sixteenths or less than an inch in diameter. long and If you are paper thin, you could take this gold and just crush it because it is thinner than oil, but it is also a piece with a very high value due to its crystalline nature and the white material here is not quartz as you might guess . the white material is a zeolite, it is a different type of mineral and the green mineral in the background is chloride and in this deposit that is about 30 miles from Moreno in Nevada there is a unique type of gold deposit in the zeolite and, without However, like me the mentioned gold is mostly found in quartz or at least many times it is found in quartz and here are some examples of gold filled quartz that one guy found with a metal detector.

The one on the far right is stained with iron and is also rusty. orange in color and the others are larger versions of pure quartz that have gold shot through several small cracks and crevices in the quartz and that is literally how it was formed, the nature of how gold deposits like this form is that a Often the At the end of the life of the vane and rock formation, I literally mean that they form from hot water containing gold that flows through cracks or faults in the rock and, like quartz, when the first is formed, quartz is usually deposited. or originally and then in the life of this vein formation, the gold is injected into the city into the system and so you tend to feel little cracks and crevices like this.

Here is another example. It's thinner, more like gold leaf, but also. injected into cracks and crevices in the white quartz. This is from the mother lode country in Northern California. Now, if the gold passes through the quartz and the quartz is pretty solid, it's not too cracked or messy. In fact, you can see what these golden quartz specimens leave behind. and they actually take this material and they cut it and make jewelry with it and if you look closely at a lot of jewelry stores they put material like this, of course, they don't just cut it into slabs like this, but they take this material and they cut it and Polish and make a gem out of it and put it in a ring or a pendant or something like that.

Now sometimes, as I say, the rock is very fractured and as you can see in this piece, there is gold all over the white quartz, but the quartz is so fractured that you could probably take this piece with your hands and break it, although it could be harder than it looks, it is very fractured, this quartz, this white quartz, but it is gold injected through that quartz that fills all the little cracks and corners that were left towards the end of the formation of the vein here is a piece of real quartz still in place in the vein in the side of a mine this kind of thing can be found with metal detectors and that can be very rich and really worth a lot of money and people who find things like this definitely make a lot of money doing it, so here's the specimen, this one is from the Philippines, the last one where the gold in the vein 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 again occupying the small spaces in the small holes in the quartz.

Here is a piece that was found in Arizona. This piece was found with a metal detector and you can see the blue in it, the blue is copper mineralization and it is not unusual for a quartz vein that is formed with gold to also have other metals and sometimes those other metals include copper and if the copper minerals oxidize like the iron did in the other example I showed you, the copper will oxidize and form generally blue and green stains instead of the orange II brick red color expected from rust. Now here are a couple of samples. of gold or natural gold or from a place called the gold field in Nevada and the 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 rock and you I can see all the gold shot around here, the gold is actually in very small pieces, although you can certainly see its coloration there in the rock.

Here is a piece of gold-

bearing

quartz from Australia, which was also detected with a metal detector and the piece. It was originally completely covered in that rusty orange-red color you see on the side of the rock. So 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 rang and he hit it with a hammer and sure enough, there was metallic gold inside. You can see it at the bottom left of the specimen. Sometimes gold is very fine. I've shown you many specimens that have huge amounts of gold, the last one you know had some gold, it's still a pretty rich rock, yeah, that piece from Australia, this piece is from Russia and you can see the gold is kind of smeared on it. the side of the rock are not very large pieces and in fact, honestly, so much gold ore is mined today that, in fact, almost all of the gold ore mined today has less than half an ounce of gold in a ton of rock and you can think about that for a minute, you know, think about how small half an ounce is, think about something like a 50 cent coin, anyway, there's roughly about half an ounce and then compare That with a ton of rock, would you know that is a huge amount?

Most gold mines work with rock containing less than half an ounce per ton of rock, some of them work with a tenth of an ounce and some even with a few hundredths of an ounce per ton of rock, so it is unusual to have super rich specimens I've been showing you here, but some like this one that have just a little bit of gold are more common. Here is another piece from Canada that has just a few small flecks of gold and you can see if you look closely on the rock. there are some little gold flecks in there and B, to be honest, this is very rich or even if it has just a few flecks in a hand specimen like this, if you add up all those specimens, all those little flecks in a ton of rock, then you may have about an ounce of this gold, the small flecks, and an ounce of gold in a ton of rock;

Well, one ounce of gold, as I'm recording, this is barely equivalent to $1,300 dollars. and then you know that $1,300 for a ton of rock is pretty good and in fact, in all honesty, in most mining operations, the cost of mining and extracting the gold that is in a ton of rock ranges from fifteen dollars at least up to a 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 over a thousand dollars of gold in that rock and that ton of rock. then you would be doing very well and many mines produce many hundreds of tons of rock per day, some literally produce that and the ones that run with large trucks and large scale can produce tens of thousands of tons of rock in a day, so you know , they may only make ten, twenty, or thirty dollars a ton, but processing 10,000 tons a day they are doing pretty well, so this is what a lot of common quartz actually looks like and it's probably decent, or even though I I don't know what the test revealed, but this is from the mother lode country in California, in Mariposa County, and you can look at this rock and see that it is stained a rusty color from the iron present in the rock and it is stained black because of the manganese and you don't really see any obvious gold, there are probably some flecks here and they are scattered throughout the rock, but like I say, it might be worth processing a ton of this rock, so you know, just because a rock looks like this and You don't see much visible gold, that's notIt means that you have not found valuable gold or that sometimes it does not reveal itself very easily and a test is necessary to determine how much gold is in the rock.

The other thing that people do is that people see these white veins and some white veins that don't have enough gold in them to make it worth processing, just because you find some white quartz in a vein, doesn't mean it's particularly valuable really. 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 the two most common elements together you end up with quartz and you really know that by yourself this is so Quartz is quite common In fact, it is probably the most common mineral on the earth's surface and just because it is found in the vein doesn't mean it is rich in gold, but sometimes it is.

I have shown you mainly quartz pieces. with gold and now let's take a look at some other things that look a little different. This is a super rich gold and silver mineral from California. This is actually from the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, out west. Nevada and dark gray minerals are a combination of various base metals like zinc and lead and maybe a little copper and those are valuable in their own right, but this or quartz broader and has quite a bit of silver and gold. and so this either there were huge quantities of this or it was mined in the old days in Virginia City and a lot of money was made extracting the gold and silver and sometimes also the base metals, now this is us the type of mineral. in perhaps one of the richest deposits on the entire planet this is from the Witwatersrand in South Africa this is the South African one or that was mine for years literally it 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 bit in that gravel, but it also turned the gravel into a solid rock called conglomerate and this material was mined. and a lot of money was made from it.

Hello dear, I'm recording something right now, so okay, I'll be on for another twenty minutes, maybe, so this is a very special kind of conglomerate and this is what they produce. in South Africa South Africa has produced enormous quantities of ore and gold in recent years. I think they started mining it seriously in the 1880s or something and they still mine it too deep underground in super deep wells. This type of rock is called 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 very deep underground and subject to heat and pressure and it was so much heat and pressure that the gold that was actually in the gravels moved a little bit and was redeposited, but there are certain layers of this conglomerate in South Africa that are rich in gold and the Miners extract it in large quantities and process it. and extract the gold and, as I say, since the 1880s, the mining country of South Africa, which looks a lot like this, has produced tons and tons of gold.

This is another usual type of this is the type of mineral that they mined in Nevada at the Karlon type mines, you can see, it doesn't look like much, it just looks like an ordinary rock, unless it contains a little more than a tenth of a ounce of gold per ton and they did not discover these deposits. They found some of it elsewhere in Nevada starting in the 1930s, but at the Carlin Trend in the Karlin area it was seen that many millions of tons of this material had been mined and so many tons of gold had been produced that They weren't discovered until the 1960s because the 19th century prospectors that were around didn't recognize this as gold or there are a couple of problems with it as a gold mineral, why didn't they recognize it, one is if you crushed this rock and bread .

This is what miners of yesteryear commonly did to test their treasure: they crushed a sample and then processed it in their gold container to see which elements were heavy. If he did that with this material because gold is literally microscopic in size. the pieces are tiny, you wouldn't have anything in your frying pan, so even the geologists who went looking for this took years to figure out where this was once they discovered it, although they somehow mastered it and another form of proof that was common in the 19th century is the test through what they call a fire test where they literally put the material, crush it and put it with a flux that melts everything and collect it in a lead button and then collect the gold from the lead button, that process would show that it shows perfectly well that it is a gold mineral, but no one in the 19th century paid to take a sample of this, crush it and process it by fire assay, but anyway this is something that is a very rich mineral and many mining companies extract tens of thousands of this mineral every day.

Here is another unusual high grade gold ore. It has some sulfides. You can see the metallic looking material and minerals on some of these. pieces of rock, but this is a special gold ore from a volcanic deposit in Gold Field. I remember, I remember, I showed you the little Gold Field specimen or that it had visible gold even though it doesn't have much visible gold. It contains quite a bit of gold and was a very rich, very high quality mineral that was mined at Golf Ile Nevada and in fact the gold field produced around five million ounces of gold throughout its history, between its discovery to early 1900s and around 1950s.

Here is another unusual type of gold ore and in fact there is a story about this material being mined in the 1960s and underneath there was a layer of this dark colored material and oxidized and underneath was a rich copper ore. Well, they dug up this dark, rusty material and dumped it in the landfill because they wanted to get to the copper ore underneath. No one bothered to test this material and discovered that it was rich in gold and in fact it is what is called a gossip. This is gossip. type of material is basically pyrite or iron sulfide, which is also called fool's gold and eventually then it oxidizes, oxidizes, decomposes and decrepit into eighths and it all ends up like that, but the gold is still in it, so that originally there was some gold in There is and there still is, but the geologists who extracted this material and the miners took this material from a mine in the 1960s and threw it away not knowing it contained gold, they threw it away to get to the copper that was underneath, so here it is. that mineral I just mentioned, pyrite, it looks yellow, it looks metallic, but you know, it's a perfect cube, but this is not gold, this is pyrite, it's a mineral that is a combination of iron and sulfur and it makes some good specimens, that beautiful specimen like this.

You can see the price it was for sale was $550 so you know it can't have value as a pretty mineral specimen and sometimes it even has gold in it and is often associated with gold minerals so just because you find fool's gold pyrite, it doesn't mean you're a failure because sometimes they occur together and in fact sometimes it's even hard to tell them apart here is a specimen you can see that has a yellowish greenish type of mineral in quartz, this is a quartz vein material and yet this amount of mineral is pyrite, if you look closely you can see some cubic shapes, some squares like the strange one in the example we were looking at, you can see some squares in this specimen that show Yes, it is not gold, it is pyrite and, nevertheless, it is gold. and pyrite often occur together and sometimes there can be literally small specks of gold dust within the pyrite crystal.

Here are some more examples of that cubic shape. You can see the rusty brown. Now this is what happens when pyrite oxidizes. Remember? I showed you the Gaussian material which was dark brown and oxidized and this is the same thing, only these specimens that you can see have retained the cubic shape of the original pyrite crystal, whereas the Ghazni material that we looked at a few seconds ago. Not long ago it didn't have that nice cubic shape, but because it's iron and sulfur, when it's exposed to air and water, it rusts like metallic iron and basically the sulfur comes out of it and what's left is the same thing.

What you have on the surface of an old, rusty nail are 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 gold and pyrite are found together. Here is a specimen where the pyrite is partially oxidized, you can still see a little bit of the yellow-green color in some parts, but you can also see the unroasted bright yellow gold that is associated with it, so sometimes just because you find a piece of pyrite does not. I mean there is no gold either. Another thing that fools miners is this thing and I have a better picture.

This is what is called a Telluride mineral and here is a close up of Telluride. This is a combination of gold and the. tellurium mineral is a mineral called calleb and sometimes it fools the miners because the miners see this and think it's just a sulfur mineral and they don't worry about it and yet these little crystals that you see are at least more or less almost half gold. By weight I will usually contain some silver and a few other things as well, but there is a considerable amount of gold right in that caliber, so if you find this sort of thing then it can be very valuable, but it often fools the miners and here are some examples of just gauge in or from the creek district in colorado this was something the miner fooled the miners at first but they quickly learned that this tellurium is a natural combination or this ID gauge is a natural combination of gold and tellurium and that gold can be relatively easily extracted here is another sample from a mine in Montana that has a little bit of telluride in the vein, which is quartz and calcite, which is the white material, 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 you don't see, you know, just looking at this image with your eyes, you don't really see any obvious gold, but if you take a magnifying glass and look Very carefully the rock into some of the small cracks and crevices, sure enough, there are small bits of gold visible in this specimen and some of them are actually right in and around.

Look where the copper is, often the gold in gold. The veins can be very small and are not always ongoing like in the first pictures I showed you, sometimes the gold in a quartz vein is tiny and difficult to see without magnification. Here is another specimen of a gold field as I say in that district of Nevada. which produced around five million ounces of gold. This is another example of high grade ore from the golf course. It has several sulfides, some of which are pyrite which is oxidized and you can see the oxidized color there, but the gold in this is very, very, very fine, it's hard to see, but still, this district, like I said, produced about five million ounces and of course Karlin, the gold is even too small to see with a handheld microscope, you need a more powerful microscope to see the gold in that Carla.

The norm now is that gold veins can occur right in the rock. Here is an example of a small vein of gold that was right on a road cut and I took a photo of this because the main cuts that run through this road sometimes you only see the expression. from a vein, maybe just a bunch of ruby ​​courts like this, you know, just a bunch of loose courts that eroded and broke away from a vein that's buried in the gravel inside, if you were to dig down here, surely you would hit the quartz vein that is. the source of all this quartz rock and this vein contains some gold, not huge amounts, but it definitely contained some gold.

Now I mentioned that there are mines where they mine tens of thousands of tons a day and this is the guy at mine, this is a mine in Nevada that I took some pictures of. I had to go visit her and they were literally digging huge truffles and you know, if you stood next to one of the big rubber tires here, those tires are about 12 feet tall. They are giants, they are taller than you, so these mines operate and extract gold on a very, very large scale and the amount of gold in the rock is relatively small, but they process large quantities and they do it at a very low cost, etc they are able to make money mining this low grade ore in large volumes, now there are still mines like this, the sixteen to one mine in Allegheny, California that produced something rich or you know they are still out there and they are still working this mine and some of the examples that I showed you at the beginning were photographs of rich gold ore from the mine sixteen to one, so know that it is still out there and there are still people doing this and it is still a worthwhile job, but also many people find rich gold ore with metal detectors by going through old areas, old mining areas.

Here is a beautiful specimen that was found by a metal detector containing several ounces of gold and the type that was metal. detecting there and stumbled upon this piece and was very pleased to find other specimens that were found by a guy with a metal detector pieces of quartz studded with rich gold or another beautiful specimen golden quartz these pieces have areal value and Then, this was also found with a metal detector. Here's a piece of gold I found where the metal detector was. It is a beautiful piece of quartz with some pretty gold. Now, sometimes, like my piece, where you don't see much gold.

People, if they want to produce a better specimen, we will take and put the quartz in an acid. There is a specific type of acid that will dissolve the port, but leave the gold behind. Now this acid is quite dangerous, in fact, it is among the most dangerous types of acid out there, so I'm not actually going to mention the name but you can see that in this piece the quartz has been eaten away a little, better showing the gold than was inside and in fact, you can eat all the quartz and leave nothing but the gold if you have enough of that. acid, this is the kind of thing you end up with if you eat basically all the gold.

This was a metal detector ticket in Arizona and it's a lot of pounds of gold and of course a lot of dollars worth of gold, so you can see that. Natural gold binding can be very profitable and I hope you enjoyed this presentation because I'm going to go ahead and give it back to myself and finish this video. Well, now you have had the opportunity to see many different specimens. of gold ore, from super rich stuff with a lot of visible gold to other stuff that just doesn't look like much and may have cost a lot of people a lot of money that they overlooked because they couldn't recognize it in the background.

Is it really necessary to take a sample? Sampling is a fundamental part of finding gold ore because just by looking at it you could tell like the assayer who didn't want to test this material and therefore lost millions and millions of dollars that he would have made if he had tested it, so Testing is important and one of the ways the ancients used to test would be to crush a sample of gold ore into a powder and then wash it in a pan of gold, this is how they would do it. I say it, but even that wastes a lot of gold.

There are a number of minerals in the round that have a lot of gold, but if you crush it and move it around, you won't see it because it's microscopic or super super small, you may never notice it. so learn to see gold minerals and recognize things and learn to sample things that might be. Do you have any idea it could be gold ore. It is important to take samples. I hope you enjoyed this video and I have a final message for you, so me too. I want to mention my book Fistful of gold if you are more interested in learning how to find gold and be successful as a prospector.

This is the source you want to consult. Basically, my book is an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about prospecting. from panning, metal detecting, dry cleaning to gold geology and even how to file a claim, it's basically everything you need to know about prospecting and it's available now on Amazon, just go to Amazon and search for a handful of gold by Chris Rothman , I guarantee it. You will also find it. I have my own website, man, that course is free and for more free information just go to the interior of Nevada. Gems calm slash prospect slash Chris prospect HTM, that's the right girl and she has all kinds of information on prospecting and mining. everything you wanted to know, including a great story and places you might want to pan for gold and finally, if you like this presentation and want to learn more about how to find your own goal, I promise I have plenty of more gold videos coming, silver and gemstones are on the way, a lot of exciting and interesting things both in the form of live action videos and slideshows, so be sure to click the subscribe button and the notification that Bell and YouTube will give you they will allow.

You know, when I post new things and also hit the like button, feel free to comment or ask questions. I promise to do my best to answer any of your questions to the best of my ability, so thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed this. see you soon