Is it Really Possible to Strike a Good Find?

Given the nature of gold, its weight, its resistance to tarnishing and therefore its high visibility, not to forget its beautiful yellow color, one of the best tools in the search for this precious metal is and has been the gold pan. Gold pans are devices with which gold can be recognized right away if it in particles that are big enough for the human eye to see. The gold pan remains to be one of the most used instruments in prospecting however it is not reliable for detecting gold terrurides or very fine grained gold like those that can be found in the Carlin type deposits, which is now thought by a lot of people to be promising for the prospector of these days. When it has come to measuring gold that cannot be seen in rock samples, the fire assay has been one of the methods that were used as standard. Nonetheless, the fire assay is expensive and takes a long time. It has been taken over by the atomic absorption spectrophotometry, which is a cheaper and fast method that is able to detect as little as 20 parts per billion in a sample. This method has made it possible for there to analysis of great amounts of samples therefore facilitating gold exploration.

Exploring a finding
The first worry after one has found a gold prospect is to decide if it worth working on and to determine its width and length. It will be just as vital to know whether or not it will keep on running between natural exposures. Usually the common succession in exploration first has to with panning, stripping, trenching, test pitting, shallow diamond drilling, sampling, and then mapping. These are steps that need to be modified to the conditions one is in as well as additional issues throughout the exploration campaign like that of work progress, the finances available, results, supplies, labor and so forth.

Gold panning
Panning is a good idea as it will in most cases show the prospector if there is a vein, shear area, or a mineralized area that has gold in it and where it is exposed and if such is the case, if the gold find is enough in amount and has sufficient regularity to make it worthwhile to work on more. If the width and the lateral extent of a deposit have not been exposed yet, there is only a limited of work that can be done by the prospector. Sometimes the prospector will be able to only scrape off the moss or the overburden and this will then be replaced by digging trenches. If the deposit has been uncovered in a trench or an outcrop, it will usually be a good idea to stake it or mark it and set markers along the strike to help in positioning the trenches. If it looks like the deposit is going to end in one of the directions, it will be a good idea to do more stripping or trenching in the surrounding area to as to see if it actually does die out, if it is faulted, or if there are other branches and bodies close to it. Then it might also be a good idea to think about blasting the rock. There are a lot of deposits that are too weathered for the prospector to be able to exam it correctly unless new openings are made by blasting.