Welcome to The Ohio State Prospectors Association

This Week on the Creek

Updated 5-14-2012 - The OSPA teamed up with the Buckeye Chapter of the GPAA to head to the Geo Fair in Cincinnatti to do some education on panning and gold prospecting in general.  You can see the panning booth was popular with the kids and the volunteers did a great job!!  Many thanks to all involved.

If you have pictures or a story you would like to share in this section, send me (JDish) a PM on the forum.

Gold Lesson

Golds atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements which occur naturally. Like all elements with atomic numbers larger than iron, gold is thought to have been formed from a supernovae nucleosynthesis process. Their explosions scattered metal-containing dusts (including heavy elements like gold) into the region of space in which they later condensed into our solar system and the Earth. On Earth, whenever elemental gold occurs, it appears most often as a metal solid solution of gold with silver, i.e. a gold silver alloy. Such alloys usually have a silver content of 8 - 10%. Electrum is elemental gold with more than 20% silver. Electrums color runs from golden silvery to silvery, dependent upon the silver content. The more silver, the lower the specific gravity. Relative sizes of a an 860kg rock ore, and the 30g of gold that can be extracted from it. Toi gold mine, Japan. Gold left behind after pyrite cube dissolved away.Gold is found in ores made up of rock with very small or microscopic particles of gold. This gold ore is often found together with quartz or sulfide minerals such as Fools Gold, which is a pyrite. These are called lode deposits. Native gold is also found in the form of free flakes, grains or larger nuggets that have been eroded from rocks and end up in alluvial deposits (called placer deposits). Such free gold is always richer at the surface of gold-bearing veins owing to the oxidation of accompanying minerals followed by weathering, and washing of the dust into streams and rivers, where it collects and can be welded by water action to form nuggets. Gold sometimes occurs combined with tellurium as the minerals calaverite, krennerite, nagyagite, petzite and sylvanite, and as the rare bismuthide maldonite (Au2Bi) and antimonide aurostibite (AuSb2). Gold also occurs in rare alloys with copper, lead, and mercury: the minerals auricupride (Cu3Au), novodneprite (AuPb3) and weishanite ((Au,Ag)3Hg2). Recent research suggests that microbes can sometimes play an important role in forming gold deposits, transporting and precipitating gold to form grains and nuggets that collect in alluvial deposits.