Currently I believe this will be the last in the series of glacial gold prospecting hypothesis posts. In this one I want to discuss the seemingly randomness and shall we say erratic nature of gold in the glaciated areas of the Midwest.
Glaciated areas are generally not known for productive placer deposits. This is because they tend to mix up jumble and destroy most types of alluvial deposits, and scatter their contents far and wide across miles and miles as the glacier slowly advances and retreats.
There are things called glacial erratics that are generally large rocks that are not native to the area where they currently lie. These large erratics were transported there either riding on top/within a glacier or on rafted blocks of ice over lakes or oceans. The ice melts and it leaves a massive boulder in the middle of what is otherwise fine lake sediments or smaller glacial till materials.
The same thing could certainly happen with stream gravels. Let’s say as the glacier first started to grow and migrate south it scooped up rich gold bearing gravels and over thousands of years they were buried within the glacier and transported to south to let’s say Ohio. As the glacier started to melt and recede these rich gravels were dropped on top of a flat Hill. Now a farmer is digging in his field and finds a layer of gravel and decides to take a pan and finds a good amount of gold. But it seemingly is only there on top of that hill and all the creeks around are rather poor in gold. It seems to make no logical sense why the gold is there at that spot. So people say gold is where you find it, but it’s not, it’s there for some reason we just don’t understand that reason.
But more often the gold in the Midwest is from hard rock sources in the Canadian Shield. As the glacier moved south over this hard rock gold area they carved off the upper softer decomposed bedrock layers, gold veins and all. And in their movement south they jumble this material together with other non gold materials and spread it across the Midwest. This leads to us having an area of low grade gold material scattered across the entire Midwest. With some hotter spots and some spots entirely devoid of gold.
This can make it hard for us prospectors in areas like this because it is hard to determine a rhyme or reason to some of our good gold streams.
In glaciated areas like the Midwest of the US us prospectors can have our hypothesis and theories but at the end of the day due to the erratic distribution of materials by the glaciers every stream and river in glaciated areas should eventually be prospected. Cause who knows maybe the glacier dropped some high grade material in a spot that doesn’t go along with any of the hypotheses that I’ve mentioned in the other articles or the other people have come up with.
Keep on digging and when all the normal prospecting theories fail you, go strike out and hit some abnormal places. You never know what you may find.
