what defines nugget verses aluvial

Hi, A question was posed to me yesterday. How do you determine when gold becomes a nugget or is just classed as aluvial gold. Very interesting question as gold is now being found smaller and smaller by the better detectors. Years ago I thought a nugget was a large piece of gold that had weight in your hand, now .1 grams are being called nuggets. Cheers

if you can pick it up with your fingers it`s a nugget
dave

I'm with you on this one travelergold. It's a mystery to me that little half-match-head sized bits of gold are commonly called nuggets here, which I think is laughable. A man who makes his living out of gold prospecting told me a nugget was anything bigger than 20 ounces, but his historically informed mate said no, a 10 ounce piece or better could be called a nugget. The professional prospector then said he called commonly found smaller pieces of gold 'colour' only.

What about all the other terms for little bits of gold, like 'fines' and 'specs'. We are really talking up some tiny bits wrongly aren't we? What are the correct terms for various sizes?

With the exception of Nuggets embedded in their quartz host rock, ALL Nuggets are considered to be alluvial gold. All sizes of nuggets. This means they are fee of their matrix (Ironstone or Quartz Reefs etc). I wouldn't consider the Welcome Stranger to be Alluvial because it had mighty chunks of quartz in it. And the Holterman Nugget was an axe-chopped gold mass in quartz so it wasn't alluvial either. But the Hand Of Faith was almost certainly Alluvial Gold. As are the vast majority of nuggets found today with a metal detector.

Alluvium is the loose material that contains gold that you can detect or pan.
Alluvium is used to describe any loose material that sits on top of bedrock or covers it. Including Gold.

The stuff you pan, no matter how fine, is alluvial gold.

Alluvial comes from the Latin word meaning "To Wash Against" because it is loose material and is usually easily moved by water action. In North America we call Alluvial gold "Placer" Gold which is a Spanish term meaning "Alluvial Sand" (aka "Sandbank"). It's a term I use a lot but I usually get blank stares here until I use the term "Alluvial". Too many people think that Alluvial gold only refers to small pannable gold, not nuggets.

Placer Gold: For some reason the term is rarely used here but it was the most common type of gold term used during the Great Goldrush in San Francisco in 1849... and many of those miner's jumped on a ship and came straight to Australia to dig here on our NSW & Victorian goldfields - which is why I'm surprised it didn't catch on. Most Placer gold tends to contain deposits of Black Sand in North America although the same can be said for some areas here as well.

All the gold you pan from creek sediments is Alluvial Gold (also called Placer Gold). Many nuggets (but not all) can be considered Placer Nuggets. Especially obvious when water worn.

According to Wikipedia, "Placer Mining is the mining of Alluvial deposits for minerals" (usually gold) ..."in modern or ancient stream beds"... "The metal or gemstones, having been moved by stream flow from an original source such as a vein, is typically only a minuscule portion of the total deposit".

Marigold: One of my work associates comes from Prospecting parents... he told me that his father would scold him and give him a clip-under-the-ear if he referred to anything under an ounce as a nugget. Anything smaller was considered to be "a bit of gold" rather than a nugget.

phoenix wrote:if you can pick it up with your fingers it`s a nugget
dave

In North America, that's called a "Picker" (you can pick it out of your pan with your fingers) .. also known as a "clinker" because you can hear it rattle in your glass bottle or jar.

.

In the 1850's & 60's the old times classified anything under 2 oz's as colour, but these days who knows, if you can pick it up with a detector it seem to be classified as a nugget. Is it that we now are mostly finding small gold and not much of the 2 oz and over we feel obligated to still call all finds with a detector as a nugget just to make our selves feel good. I know if I find a small piece of gold with or without a detector I feel good anyway.

Wombat

You're absolutely right Fencejumper, I probably should have said "gold that was still in the primary deposit" or something like that. I was thinking of gold veins in large quartz deposits that were still in their original resting place. As you said, gold with quartz (or even some other parent rock) attached to it that has moved away from where it first popped out of the ground would surely be considered alluvial gold. Unless you're a miner and you go looking for the source of the gold in the parent rock, most of the gold you tend to find as a fossicker is probably going to be alluvial in nature.

Quite right fencejumper, most people i talk to don't realize that alot of WA gold and any gold on slopes that has not been washed along some distance in a creek is eluvial gold, not alluvial gold. Of course many nuggets in flat areas of desert and on slopes no where near drainage lines/creeks is alluvial gold because it was deposited/moved by ancient rivers and creeks (maybe 250 million years ago) that are now long gone and eroded away leaving the gold behind on the present landsurface.

I think a nugget is any solid piece of gold over about 1 gram. The newspapers in the gold rush often reported finds of 1 & 2 ounce sized nuggets, so they respected these "small nuggets" even then. Any nugget over 1 oz is big today and should be celebrated. I do know people who only carry 5kg scales and only nuggets over say 20 grams are weighed, the small ones go unwashed and unweighed into the container and only see light of day when they are tipped into the dolly and the pounded lump is weighed.

Of course when out detecting with friends you weigh it all, after all your 10 nuggets for a 2.9 gram tally may beat your mates 2.4 gram, 6 niugget tally.

Tributer

travelergold wrote:Hi, A question was posed to me yesterday. How do you determine when gold becomes a nugget or is just classed as aluvial gold. Very interesting question as gold is now being found smaller and smaller by the better detectors. Years ago I thought a nugget was a large piece of gold that had weight in your hand, now .1 grams are being called nuggets. Cheers

A nugget is classed as a nugget when it comes in the form of a solid lump of native gold free from any attached conglomerate,whether it being found in amongst alluvial or eluvial wash.
Wombat your right about the old timers of the early 1850/60s.They classed all gold nuggets bellow the 2 ounce mark as mere colors.I do believe the reason for this was due to the fact that the gold being found back then was so plentiful and consistently large at the time,that's probably why they ranked anything bellow 2 ounces as colors.
Any gold that is found in amongst sand silt or mud left by flowing water,is classed as Alluvial Gold.

Cheers kon61.

Gday

A nugget is a nugget and why would you bother knitpicking over the name of it?, does it really matter what size it is, anything that you could pick up in your fingers I would call a nugget, anything that I had to roll back to the car I would call a clunker, anything in the pan I would call fines.

Makes me laugh when I hear statements like a professional told me that they would call only anything over 20 oz's a nugget, lumps that size are a rarity and not common place, so I would estimate that if that were the case very few so called pro prospectors would never have found a nugget before.

One time a bloke said to me that he does not bother digging up small nuggets and only digs the big pieces, I didnt even bother to comment, for a start how could you tell what is big and what is small anyway?, and would any of us knowingly walk away from a target, doubt it.

There are some misconceptions about gold deposits and the use of the word ALLUVIAL so here are some explanations.

ELUVIAL--eluvial deposits are those geological deposits and soils that are derived by "in situ" weathering plus gravitational movement or acumulation.

ALLUVIAL--deposit--A layer of broken or rocky matter, or sediment formed from material that has been carried in suspension by a river or stream and dropped as the velocity of the current decreases.

cheers

stayyerAU

When putting the shovel to task cleaning the block after my airdales a "nugget" is a "nugget " some big some small ! Has nothing to do with gold . But defines nugget .

Alluvial, Elluvial, Placer, Colloidal, ... whatever. It's all ELUSIVE!!!

Robert

Goldnomad wrote:Alluvial, Elluvial, Placer, Colloidal, ... whatever. It's all ELUSIVE!!!

Robert

I'll agree with you there mate

Wombat

No matter if the gold found is of the A or E type its always nice to find it.I think of a speciman as anything that has more rock than gold. Enclosed a couple of links of gold found on the Palmer by someone else.Was over 40 Oz and came back to 28 after acid.Some of you may have seen it at last years Wedderburn token hunt.
Rwork
https://2img.net/h/i946.photobucket.com/albums/ad309/Rayswork/Golden%20files/Goldenfiles020.jpg

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