Hey Clay.. Do you know what methodology they use to come up with such numbers? If they know there is X amount, seems they should know where it is, or at least some
of it... And if I knew where that 60% was, I certainly wouldn't be writing a paper about it, I'd have my head stuffed in a hole somewhere...
My gut feeling from what little I know, those percentages that are left in the ground will grow as more knowledge is gained...
The report itself will give you the methods they used to come up with their figures. This was a serious multi-year report involving field studies and some well respected geologists.
You can download the report at
Land Matters by searching the
Library. Here's a link to the download page
Gold Resources in the Tertiary Gravels of California.
This report only addresses gold in deposits from the tertiary period (66 million to 2.58 million years ago). It doesn't cover the many other types of placer deposits in California and elsewhere. It doesn't cover the unmined portions of the Motherlode (the Motherlode by definition does not include placers). It doesn't include the many other hardrock gold sources in California. There's a lot more gold still to be found that isn't in this report.
The report does point out that where the gold is still unmined is not a secret but profitable ways to mine it need to be investigated. The 60% of the gold still left in those tertiary gravels weren't left there because they were unknown but because the easiest method of mining them became too expensive. Keep that fact in mind when you read the report - it's all about
mining at a profit. That should be a lot easier now - multiply all the gold value figures in the report by 37 to get the current values. The report was written when gold was $35 an ounce! HELLO
The 507 million dollars of gold already mined from those gravels would be worth nearly 19 Billion dollars today. The gold still left to be mined represents about 22.5 Billion dollars. Those are
very conservative figures. Go get u sum!
As with all the PDFs in the Land Matters library this report has been OCR, checked for completeness and copyright and the text can be copied and searched. There are no restrictions on copy/paste, searching or obnoxious warning pages or every page logos like with google books. The intent of the Land Matters library materials formatting is to make the books and reports more usable and encourage people to share resources that aren't restricted in their usefulness. Please share what you find there.
Heavy Pans
