by Awsome

Created on: February 17, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

You can find gold at every location in the planet. The important part is where you find it and how concentrated the deposit is, in some places it is not concentrated enough, in others the problem is not concentration but location. In New England the gold is very sparse but it is close enough to processing plants to be economically viable. There is a massive gold deposit in northern Canada on Baffin Island, but it is useless because the price to transport machines to dig it out, then to transport the machines and the gold back to a processing plant near more livable areas far exceeds the amount of money one would receive for the gold. In New England the hard part would be finding a gold deposit because the gold is very near to civilization.

A good place to start looking would be in rivers and streams. The gold in the rivers comes from a very highly concentrated source (vein deposit) which is eroded from its original position and transported to rivers and streams. Once you found gold in a river or stream, you would need to go up stream and try to locate the source. As you got closer to the source the gold would become more abundant, and perhaps larger. Once you found the end of the gold in the river, you would need to start looking on land for quartz veins in the surrounding rock. They are usually formed during mountain building. When two plates collide they create mountains but they do not completely come together, there are cracks in the rock which fluid can flow through. The fluid in the form of ground water is heated by an igneous intrusion found well below the surface of the earth. The hot fluid is in a cyclical cycle in the ground because hot fluid will rise and cool fluid will fall to replace it and the previously cool fluid will heat up continuing the cycle. The hot water flows through the rocks and dissolves tiny particles in the rock, because gold is naturally present in almost all rocks in a very small amount it becomes concentrated in this flowing hot water. As the gold rich hot water rises it cools and the gold precipitates out in the veins which are also quartz rich thus concentrating the gold. These veins then begin to be eroded and the gold can be found in the rivers, which you already did.
There are other ways in which gold can be concentrated but they all include hot water dissolving rock and when the liquid cools gold precipitates. But given the geology in the New England area the scenario provided is the most likely.
Finding gold takes alot of skill, knowledge and luck, but the payoff is well worth it which is why some people strike it rich, while others never find anything.

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