fools gold

[The Pick]

Is pyrite and real gold often found in the same place?

[jeff of pa]

Maby this will help answer your Questions

http://www.minerals.net/mineral/sulfides/pyrite/pyrite.htm

[omnicognic]

That was a great link! Thanks Jeff!

[bakergeol]

The answer to your question is yes. Pyrite is a common mineral in mineralized zones which contain gold. Yes your detector will detect pyrite. Once I got involved with some newbies who had brought back a couple of pickup loads of sand(actually stuff from a tailing pile). They ran it on a table and ended up with quite a few 50lb buckets of yellow metal. They thought all that pyrite was mainly gold and they were going to get rich. Well they didn't get rich but if they had 100 million tons of the stuff they would have. I had their pyrite assayed and it came back about an ounce of gold per ton. They didn't have that much material and as the leach cost(sulfides-roasting and high acid cost)would have been prohibitive we let it go.

The moral of this story is that pyrite on occasion does contain gold and is not always "fools gold".

George

[cptbil]

Old Chinese saying!
"Where "one" finds GOLD! "One" will find Quartz"
"Where "one" finds Quartz, :P "one" will not necessary find Gold!"
SO! VERYee SALYee!

[pgleba]

Yes. Pyrite and gold can be found together. In fact pyrite itself can contain gold. The greater percentage of gold produced in mines does not come from mines containing gold alone. It is a byproduct for mining for copper-lead-zinc. Examples are the porphyritic bodies found in western Canada down to Chile and volcanogenic bodies in New Brunswick, Ontario, Japan and elsewhere.