Placer Gold Deposits for Dummies

placer gold deposits

No matter how many times we come across their work, we are regularly amazed at the level of dumbassery pounded out by ignorant freelancers attempting to help other, just as greedy, people find gold. We haven't checked, but we suspect that we've already featured more than a dozen exposés of clueless prospecting hints written by people who've never searched for gold anywhere except a flea market. To their number, we now add returning DotD June Kane and her bizarre attempt to list "Gold-Bearing Soil Types."

The first time Kane was here, she'd (badly) rewritten a post about topography types. Apparently an early "cleanup team" member, she this time was attempting to make sense of a 2010 post by one Shari Caudill. Suffice it to say, Kane's rewrite was not an improvement...

Off the top of our staff geologist's head, the only "type" of soil that is likely to be gold-bearing is alluvium, in particular recent stream deposits. Kane managed to spit out he word "alluvium," although she pretty much munged up her little survey of the topic:

"Alluvium is a fertile soil that consists of clay, sand, silt, gravel and organic matter. It is formed by rivers and is most often found in floodplains and river deltas such as those of the Mississippi in the U.S., the Nile in Northern Africa and the Ganges River in India. It is also found in some river banks, particularly where a river empties into a lake."

We guess we'll buy that, although that's not really descriptive of the soil type; not to mention that delta deposits such as those at the mouth of the Mississippi are tens of thousands of feet thick. Oh, and there isn't much gold there... June went on to misinterpret some technical article she pretended to have read, telling her readers that,

"...gold is found in alluvial riverbeds, including almost 130 locations in Great Britain and Ireland. These gold deposits may have been carried from other areas and concentrated in the alluvial soil by the fast-moving river waters."

Wow: a whole 130 locations in 126,000 square miles! Of course, all that pales alongside June's bizarre statement that,

"Gold is relatively rare, but it occurs in various types of soils and environments, particularly those that have been shifted or compacted by the action of water, ice, volcanoes and Earth's tectonic plates."

Uh, yeah: we're at a loss to think of a location that hasn't been "shifted... by the action of... Earth's tectonic plates." Maybe Iceland? Moving right along, Once Kane had misinformed about alluvium, she was left to explain other "soil types" that might be gold-bearing (a tough job, since there probably aren't any). To that end, June told us that,

• "Glaciation... concentrated gold-bearing gravels on the northern and eastern slopes of Dawson Range and along some areas of the Yukon River..." – Well, yeah, but June neglected to mention the source of the gold. Hint: it wasn't a glacier. Oh, and by the way, June? Those gravel deposits are – you guessed it – ALLUVIUM!
• "In northwestern Iran, soil that contains carbonate and black shale formations has been found to be gold-bearing." – Sorry, June, but "Precambrian carbonate and black shale formations which have been intruded by a weakly mineralised [sic] granitoid" are not "SOIL"!
• "Gold-bearing arsenian pyrite rocks are found in limestone soil deposits in several regions of China. " – Once again, June, limestone is not a "soil type"!

Kane's ignorance of the words she attempted to parrot is obvious, as is her clear unsuitability to write any sort of description of gold deposits. Instead of providing more details on the occurrence of placer gold in alluvial deposits she started blathering ignorantly about hard-rock mining. Then again, our Dumbass of the Day knew so little about placer gold that she illustrated her article with an image of one of the world's largest open-pit copper mines. Feh.

SI - MINING