Where is glacial placer gold found?

by Prospector Jess

Good evening, everybody.

Prospector Jess here, hunting for gold.com.

I’m here to do another presentation on gold and gold prospecting. we are here to help you find more gold. So tonight I asked something kind of interesting. It came up from a question from one of you guys and that was, hey, you look, why am I not finding a lot of gold? I live in an area that has a lot of glaciation in its history.

The northern North America and Canadian continent is, was once covered by massive glaciers in the ice age. And so one of the legacies left behind from that is something special about where the gold went, because it wasn’t that the gold wasn’t there. It’s what it did with the gold that’s of importance. So stay tuned, watch this and see what you find out because we have some information for you tonight. They will help you understand what happens and where is glacial placer gold and why.

So let’s start with something really simple. I have a fun little experiment I wanted to do for you. Just to give you kind of an opening picture, let’s start with that.

The theme here is Glacial placer Gold. And looking at this, this is a massive glacier being fed from two glaciers up above. Notice the pile of rocks and cobbles and rebels. It looks like dust, you know, dirt, but it’s really not. It’s massive piles of, of rocky material coming down the mountains being torn up from the sides and the edges and the bottom edge of the glacier. So when a glacier comes down canyon, it does some incredible stuff and you know, kind of reminds you of, of this kind of thing where you have, you know, D-8 or D-10 caterpillar dozer and it’s grinding and pushing everything in its tracks. So this is kind of what we’re looking for here.

Why does this happen? Well, I’m going to show you something kind of intriguing little experiment. So bear with me. We’re going to go to the lab before we go to the lab. Let’s go to the blackboard and study a little bit of theory.

So what are the three phases of water? The three phases of water. Basically areā€¦ gas, also known as steam, which can be converted to where from water or liquid water. Which can be inter converted from or to, and these fancy arrow symbols simply mean that you can go back and forth in the transformation, you can convert it from and to these different things, or it can be converted to a solid, also known as ice. Now one of the things you have to understand about a gas is that this guy pretty low viscosity. So you can, you can basically have like a solid or even liquid and it’ll flow through a gas readily. Okay. Liquid on the other hand has a little more of viscosity to it and so it has a tendency to allow things to flow through it, but it has a resistance, a higher resistance than gas to gas does.

They’re both technically, they’re both kind of act as liquids (fluid.) That’s why airplanes fly, but I won’t get into that. But the fact that the liquid has this extra resistance is all the reason why things get towed along and sorted out by a stream when it’s in high flow and why the gold tends to concentrate out in specific ways because that friction has a big effect. A lot of people, they make the assumption that it’s pressure, it’s not pressure, it’s the fluid friction. It’s the frictional forces of the fluid on the object, whether it’s static or moving. And that friction can develop a tremendous amount of force on an object if it’s solid. On the other hand, this guy has a big problem. Okay. And that is basically solids or liquids. Solids and gases can’t penetrate through it readily. There. There are some things like sublimation and so forth, but we won’t get into that here.

The fundamental principle is what I’m going to show you in our laboratory experiment and that is what happens when a rock or gold ore runs into a flowing river of ice. A solid cause. Remember the snow goes down, it lands on the snow. Let me shoot me again. So the snow goes down to to lean on these regions and compresses packs down, down, down until it hits a certain point where it actually reforms the crystals. At that stage there was reformed crystals become a brick of ice, but they’re still moving and twisting and they can actually flow, but in very, very, very slow motion. Hence these, these glacial rivers can, can move down hill and we’ll move down hill. They just won’t move very fast, but that belies their power. So let’s take a look what happens when I take a piece of gold ore you remember our famous chunk of Calico pyrite gold door.

Okay? So I take this piece of gold over and I take my handy dandy “test brew” mug. Okay. And what are we going to do is pull out some ice from the gold, from the, from our experiment, the lab, which is all melted, but there’s still enough of it left here and I dropped my goal though, are on top of it. What do you think’s going to happen? Absolutely nothing. It can’t penetrate the ice, but the ice can’t penetrate it. And so what happens is any forces at that ice has will be imparted on the gold ore as it passes over it or goes by it like the bulldozer you see next to me. Now that’s what happens there. What happens to our gold? Or if we have it in a river without any ice, well boom, it goes to the bottom. In other words, it’s going to basically flow through that river and any forces that are in part, it will happen because of the viscosity of the water and the flow rate of either the water or the ore.

So what happens is these forces balance out, but the ones having to do with the solid ice are very important. So let’s take a look and think about that for a minute. What does it mean about where the gold goes? Well, what it means is when I’m looking at this river of ice going down the mountain, I all of a sudden have an idea that any of those rocks are basically not going to be able to penetrate into that ice and vice versa. They don’t mix. So the ice looks an awful lot like you know, like our good friend the bulldozer. And so when that happens, you know what, what we have here is this motion of an object being shoved along as opposed to being dragged along like it is with water and so when it’s shoved along it has a totally different behavior.

That’s the thing to note for glaciers. And where did the gold go? The gold got ripped out and torn down hill. I’m going to go back to the front picture again and when it goes down hill you notice it’s, I mean these little bars, well those bars eventually end up in what’s called a glacial Moraine and that is at the very end. The bulldozer doesn’t go any further down the valley. It stops usually somewhere way down the valley. Literally it’s going to, it’s going to end up downhill and it will leave these huge piles called glacial moraines. They will consist of two primary components, lots of ultra fine dust, which will include flour gold finer than any flour gold you’ve ever seen because it’s basically a powder. It’ll also include what’s called glacial till and it’s rocks and minerals that are ground to a micron kind of level.

They’re so fine that they’re, they’re kind of dangerous. They’re dust. And, and then it also includes sands, gravels, boulder’s cobbles. Okay. All the normal stuff you’d see in a riverbed, the differences that those will be deposited typically at the tip of the glacier before it retreats. And so that’s the biggest place you’re going to find any kind of rough for, of course gold ore, ore that might be left behind is those bigger cobbles. We’ll have that. And so you typically see that in areas where there’s been a lot of glaciation, you’ll see that kind of, you know, build up these, these moraines as gravel pits and gravel minds. Also in those areas that the glacial till will tend to knock out anything that’s soft and tear it up and leave a pit at the bottom. That pit will be like a sluice box, a place where gold will tend to concentrate out as the rivers and stuff from the retreating glacier form and drive anything down in there.

So there’s going to be some sorting that goes on on the tip. But the main thing is the gravel and the gravel mines or gravel pits may or may not have significant amounts of gold. Typically they don’t have much because most of the gold that you’d find in one of these glaciers, go back to that picture again, we’ll have been ground and pulverized into very, very fine flour. So the other kind of goals you’re looking for is fine flour, gold, and it’s going to be widely disseminated to call it or distributed. It’s going to spread all over Timbuktu and you’ll find these, these, you know, flour gold deposits all over the central US. And so a lot of people have asked me why there’s no gold in Missouri and why there’s no Gold in Illinois and and so forth and Michigan, et. Cetera.

And the answer is, well, there is gold and there are actually gold mines, for example, in Michigan, in the northern peninsula.

But down in the central parts and anywhere you look at the Great Lakes, those, those were formed from glaciers. So anywhere you see those big wings going out and you know, get a map on Google, Google ice age, and look up the glacier maps and you’ll see where these glaciers went. They were huge. Even in the Sierra Nevada, they were huge. Yosemite Valley, it was all carved by glaciers.

The way you tell a glacial valley is a water cut valley will tend to be a “V” shape. A glacier will cut a broad flat section in the middle and tunnel on the side. They call it a “U” shape. That U shape will basically tell you that this was cut by a glacier, wasn’t to any goal that you find will tend to be load gold or one of these pits or areas where it was sheltered from this massive sheet of Isis grinding like a giant D-10 Caterpillar like a D-100 bulldozer.

Okay. So that’s the idea here. And that’s kind of tonight’s tip. I wanted to touch bases with you. we still have, this, “GDU” thing going on at https://Sourdoughminer.com/GDU/ . just wanted to call your attention to it, over here, right there. And so, take advantage of it. give me a note or a comment below about any questions you have about glacier gold and any fines that you have. A fine glacier gold. And as some of you in Indiana, for example, have shown me some great specimens of super fine gold.

If you’re finding now, don’t lose heart. There’s lots of gold in these regions. It’s just really tough to get. But if you’re good at getting that fine gold out, you’ll be great in Alaska or California, you know that it’s just, it’s, they’re all over. The gold is pretty much everywhere, but it’s fine and disseminated for the most part. It’s the concentrations that make some places better than others. And that’s again, what government gold maps and some of the other things I teach her about is how to find that gold and where it concentrates. But in this case, there’s some specific hints like the gravel pits, they will help you find more gold.

Prospector Jess. over and out.

Have a good prospecting night and I’ll see You tomorrow!