Gold in the ocean

KevinInColorado

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Have you ever seen Bering Sea Gold, the tv show? Lots of ocean nugs!
 

Goldfleks

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20170218_103303.jpg 20170218_103304.jpg

Plenty of beach gold to be found. not always in the nugget shape (or gold) and sometimes comes with diamonds!
 

Lanny in AB

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Yes, but when nuggets get dumped in the ocean, what's underneath the placer will make all the difference as to whether the nuggets can be recovered. If there's a deep and very soft sediment deposit they're hitting, they'll work their way down quickly, and I know that's an issue in lakes as well.

Up north in a remote placer goldfield, there was a great little creek that produced nice nuggets, and there were huge boulders all along the creek which impeded recovery of those nuggets for the early placer miners, and with today's mining laws, it's still not possible to work the stream to remove the boulders either, even though modern-day equipment would easily do the job. The gold was coarse right up to where the stream discharged it into the lake, but it's a very deep glacial lake, and it's too deep to dive (in the mountains as well, high altitude, which seriously complicates the dive tables), where the gold got dropped off the shelf, plus the bottom is muck.

So, yes, it's possible under the proper conditions, with a suitable underlying clay or bedrock bottom that's not too deep (water not too deep as well) so the nuggets will hit and stick. If you've watched Bering Sea gold, and I've chased the gold along the Bering sea, clay layers will stop the gold from dropping, as of course would any bedrock shelving. There were some guys dredging there off the mouth of a stream where I was working that were getting some good stuff from off some clay that also held a lot of rocks.

All the best,

Lanny
 

deserdog

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Another thing to remember about Bering Sea gold is that not too long ago sea level was a lot lower. As the glaciers melted and sea level rose, the mouths of the rivers were drowned.
 

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Zolotov

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View attachment 1418998 View attachment 1418999

Plenty of beach gold to be found. not always in the nugget shape (or gold) and sometimes comes with diamonds!

What people says is that it is not very good business to search for gold on the beaches. It is better to look for it in the mountains. That's what I have been told. If you have good metal detector device, of course.
 

Aufisher

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Many placer miner pull less than that College ring per year!
 

Goodyguy

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The
oceans of the world carry millions of tons of gold in suspension. Scientists know that each cubic mile of seawater
holds about 25 tons of gold. That's a total of 27 million tons of gold in the
world's oceans.

http://www.fascinatingearth.com/node/281

GG~
 

Goldfleks

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I feel like they have the technology to pull the gold out of soution, but it's eigther too expensive (for now) and even if it became cost effective, it would effectivly make gold worthless so what's the point.
 

deserdog

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If I was rich, I would do a little genetic engineering. There are several species of bacteria that coat themselves with gold. I would isolate the genes that make this happen and insert it into one of the fastest growing plants on earth, kelp.
 

Bejay

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Give thought to this: Veins of gold bearing material can exist out along the continental shelf or radiate from the shoreline out into the sea. As the vein breaks down the free gold can exist basically in place. Watching bearing sea gold one might take notice that the gold nuggets being found are in a beige formation on the bottom of the sea bed where whats his name is dredging. The blackish/grey sea floor is not producing gold. Very briefly the camera panned up to the bluff and a distinct formation of beige host rock lies vertically adjacent to a blackish grey formation in the bluff. I'll pay more attention as the program continues. But that is definitely nuggets that are water worked....as they are not very angular. The continental shelf has changed over geologic time as has sea level. Additionally mouths of major rivers have changed course where they enter into the ocean....in many cases the change has been measured in miles!

Bejay
 

GoldpannerDave

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The
oceans of the world carry millions of tons of gold in suspension. Scientists know that each cubic mile of seawater
holds about 25 tons of gold. That's a total of 27 million tons of gold in the
world's oceans.

Riches from the Sea | Our Fascinating Earth

GG~

At least one famous scientist tried to recover the gold from the oceans. He was a Nobel Prize winner in 1918. He also sold to BASF rights to his patent on a catalyst to make ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen. He got one pfennig per kilogram of ammonia BASF made. BASF made a small start with 20 tonnes in 1914, but the war years made production greatly increase to produce ammonia for fertilizer and munitions.

Haber was extremely wealthy in the 1920's when it put his wealth into trying to recover gold from seawater to repay Germany's war reparations. He basically spent about all he had without finding a process that would recover the gold; it was too much entropy to overcome. Even today, it is not cost effective.
 

KevinInColorado

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Entropy always prevails. :)

...You can only break even at absolute zero and you can't get to absolute zero!
 

deserdog

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I just did a search: sea level during the ice age. Said sea level was about 120 meters lower than today. So there are easily drowned river placers.
 

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Zolotov

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I just did a search: sea level during the ice age. Said sea level was about 120 meters lower than today. So there are easily drowned river placers.

What an interesting info. But I do not agree. The sea has not risen in a day, this process lasted thousands of years. As the sea level have been rising year by year, the gold lying on the coast has been pulled deep down into the sea by wave movements every day. With each big wave, gold is pulled towards the center of the ocean. So, one storm in a year that generated big waves probably pulled all gold nuggets deeper into the sea. And if there was a tusnami every 10 years, there have been even bigger displacement. So, all the (placer) gold in the sea must lie at some unknown level. This level could be equal to: 120 meters + the size of maximum wave which passed some day over last 125,000 years (ice age). Therefore all placer gold is below this level. I am correct?
 

deserdog

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There is gold off the coast of Ak and other states. Wave action does not carry gold out to sea, but consintrates it in certain areas. Somewhere I saw a map of submerged beach lines off of Ak
Most of these submerged beach lines have consintrations of gold
 

KevinInColorado

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What an interesting info. But I do not agree. The sea has not risen in a day, this process lasted thousands of years. As the sea level have been rising year by year, the gold lying on the coast has been pulled deep down into the sea by wave movements every day. With each big wave, gold is pulled towards the center of the ocean. So, one storm in a year that generated big waves probably pulled all gold nuggets deeper into the sea. And if there was a tusnami every 10 years, there have been even bigger displacement. So, all the (placer) gold in the sea must lie at some unknown level. This level could be equal to: 120 meters + the size of maximum wave which passed some day over last 125,000 years (ice age). Therefore all placer gold is below this level. I am correct?

No.
 

GoldpannerDave

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Entropy always prevails. :)

...You can only break even at absolute zero and you can't get to absolute zero!

It is my biggest problem with my own gold mining! :)
 

russau

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May 29, 2005
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St. Louis, missouri
What an interesting info. But I do not agree. The sea has not risen in a day, this process lasted thousands of years. As the sea level have been rising year by year, the gold lying on the coast has been pulled deep down into the sea by wave movements every day. With each big wave, gold is pulled towards the center of the ocean. So, one storm in a year that generated big waves probably pulled all gold nuggets deeper into the sea. And if there was a tusnami every 10 years, there have been even bigger displacement. So, all the (placer) gold in the sea must lie at some unknown level. This level could be equal to: 120 meters + the size of maximum wave which passed some day over last 125,000 years (ice age). Therefore all placer gold is below this level. I am correct?
?????????? I would surely like to find out if your correct!! BUT in addition to what has been said about the Oceans level , NOBODY has included or talked about the erosion of the lands into the Ocean that helped raise the Oceans levels. MUST HAVE BEEN THEM DARN MINERS FAULT !!!!:occasion14:
 

Goodyguy

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?????????? I would surely like to find out if your correct!! BUT in addition to what has been said about the Oceans level , NOBODY has included or talked about the erosion of the lands into the Ocean that helped raise the Oceans levels. MUST HAVE BEEN THEM DARN MINERS FAULT !!!!:occasion14:

Not to mention the 100's of tons of airborne dust that settles into the ocean every day and that's on top of the 60 tons of cosmic dust that settles every 24 hrs.
 

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