Hey, welcome.
This is prospector Jess and I wanted to show you something special.
This particular sample that we’re looking at right here, is a sample, or a core sample, that was taken from the world famous, Homestake Gold Mine.
Embedded in this sample is a variety of things I wanted to call to your attention. Looking at each of these layers, you can see this is kind of a marbleized Gneiss structure, you should look that up.
That’s a metamorphic stone, very fine grained. Buried in the fine grains in this stone, if you look carefully as I roll it, you can see it kind of sparkles. You can definitely see it on the tip here where it’s broken.
That’s where there’s a fissure of quartz and perhaps some calcite marble, and what appears to be a nice layer of pyrites. Buried in those pyrites, because they’re chalcopyrites, is probably some gold. But in the fine interstitial sections of this sample, you can find microcrystalline gold. Stuff so fine you can’t see it with the naked eye.
You might be able to see it with a good hand lens, but the fact is, it’s gonna be really tough. What you’re gonna have to do is have it crushed and assayed.
But that’s not the real story here.
The story is the fact that they took these samples in a rather orderly fashion. These are diamond drilled, cylinders of gold. Little pillars. Each one of which tells a story, vertically, down through the gold mine, telling them exactly what’s down below and how much gold there is.
That helps them figure out whether it’s financially feasible to go after that gold or not. In most cases, it’s not. But this is one sure fire way to cut down the amount of waste and increase the likelihood that you’re gonna hit pay dirt that actually works for you.
The same thing holds true when you’re sampling you’re placer mine.
You have lots of quartz and other crud to go through to get down to the fine or coarse gold that you’re looking for.
The truth is, these samples want to be separated out as you collect them and kept in separate vials, so that you can track exactly where you got what quality of gold out of your system. Don’t forget that next time you go mining.
You want a sample, whether it’s a core in a hard cord load mine, or whether it’s getting a sample from a fixed amount of dirt out of your pay streak in your placer mine. It doesn’t matter, alluvial, mountain, I don’t care.
You sample. Sample, sample, sample, and don’t forget that.
That’s it for today, for this Gold Miner’s Minute.
Good Prospecting,
Prospector Jess
