Washing Pebbles: A Slow but Rewarding Task

[turbo]

Did you hear about that guy that went to Alaska to look for diamonds? found them too. Maybe more than are in South Africa. I just saw a show on PBS about it. Can't remember his name though.

Haven't heard of him. When hunting/fishing/hiking, I always keep my eyes open for exposed pegmatite with large grain-size. If you see granite with very large-grain components, it's a pretty good sign that the pegmatite cooled very slowly. If there is any sign of clevelandite and/or lepidolite in the outcropping, that would be a GOOD place to return with chisels and hammers and start poking around a bit. A new tourmaline find on a par with the Dunton mine pockets in Newry would probably command millions of dollars, especially since other native sources of tourmaline have played out in the intervening years.

 

[tribdog]

This guy figured out that the rocks in Alaska resembled those around Kimberlite pipes, but couldn't find the pipes because glaciers had smoothed everything and moved everything. So he built a machine to separate diamonds from dirt and took tons and tons of samples. When ever he found something he put a mark on a map and he just followed those marks until he found a place where there were no diamonds, backed up a little bit and found the pipes. According to the PBS show its going to be huge.

 

[turbo]

This guy figured out that the rocks in Alaska resembled those around Kimberlite pipes, but couldn't find the pipes because glaciers had smoothed everything and moved everything. So he built a machine to separate diamonds from dirt and took tons and tons of samples. When ever he found something he put a mark on a map and he just followed those marks until he found a place where there were no diamonds, backed up a little bit and found the pipes. According to the PBS show its going to be huge.

That shows some ingenuity. That's the kind of geologist I'd like to hang with. There are some local streams and rivers around where you can pan gold, but the real pay-off would be to find the rock from which the gold has been eroded over the years, and tackle that.

 

[tribdog]

I would like to try gold mining. I've worked at a mine, but it was all microscopic gold. I did get to hold a 90 pound bar once though.