LARGE QUARTZ WASH, is this from the last iceage?

This type of quartz seems different from the broken up fractured quartz commonly seen on hills, it looks waterworn but it might have been shaped from slow moving glaciers just slowly grinding along for hundreds of miles, some of the stones are like watermelons, quartz being hard seems to be the only rock that has survived, common in the old diggings and in some creeks, whether it has any relationship with gold I don't know but if gold was with this material when it was moving the gold being soft would be wearing down and be very smooth,
When I was in Coffs we saw white quartz wash on top of the hills that thick it looked like hail, this we were told came from South America, if this is true it would have to be when the continents were joined together.
You need a Geologist on board to answer topics like this.
cheers Tezz

not sure about where you are... but sometimes you get old river beds on top of hills, thats where alot of the round rocks come from.
sometimes that's why the hill has survived, because the bottom of the river turn to cement and made it harder than the surrounding ground..
got a geoligy course this weekend so i'll see whether these opinions are correct..
cheers

A pic is better than a thousand words! but yes you are correct about some wear patterns being eluvial and not alluvial. A classic example of this is ,in my opinion , the Ballarat nugget ! Not water worn but ground away with eons of material moving over the gold to give the worn appearance !

Dunno about south America tezz, my little time scale app shows Antarctica and India in between us. Interestingly nearly the whole of Australia is under the ice cap in this shot, even the pilbara!



DD

Diggerdude, interesting picture, tried to move the time bar, is their a link to this so I can get it to work?
cheers Tezz

Try this Tezz.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/earthviewer/index.html

What a great little program, thanks for posting Diggerdude and thanks for the link Gold Miner