# Tiny flecks of bright silvery metal crystals found in northeastern PA stream



## Alondro (Feb 22, 2022)

I have been doing a few pans here and there and found some interesting flecks in a small stream. They're very tiny. Here are a couple pics, sorry I can't zoom in any closer. The second has them next to a squash seed for reference. Under a microscope, they have crystalline appearance, 3 taper down to a fine point and even have parallel striations across the crystal where it looks like they formed between quartz or other crystalline mineral grains. At the wide top, they bulge into rounded portions, so they were molten as the minerals crystallized and squeezed the tiny globules into spear-head tips and rounded tops. 

This must be from a rock close to where I found it. They were in gravel not even down to bedrock where the stream carved out a pit as it approached a culvert at an oblique angle, and that stream gets HEAVILY washed. Often the entire stream bed is torn up when heavy rains hit. So that means they were also placed in that location no more than a few years ago!

They could still be placer, however, just an odd type. That region has many boulders carried by glaciers from Canada. These flecks might be wearing out of some of those boulders. No way to know unless I can find the source rock... and given the sheer number of boulders in that stream... ehhhhhh... XD

Might pan a little deeper near that culvert and see if I find any larger bits. If a few trace flecks are all there is, it's not worth spending much time on. Still, an interesting find for a location that's mainly shale at higher levels! I did find some strange nodules in that shale which I've confirmed to be very dense metal sulfides with iron pyrite streaks in the interior (SG around 5.5 for the nodules

). I'll make a post on those and see if anyone has any idea how on earth such things formed in shale.


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## jobinyt (Feb 26, 2022)

Since you've gotten no reply... can't help but wonder if that is from slag or other industrial waste - perhaps used on winter roads.


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## Alondro (Feb 26, 2022)

jobinyt said:


> Since you've gotten no reply... can't help but wonder if that is from slag or other industrial waste - perhaps used on winter roads.


I don't think so. These were in the creek bed under quite a bit of rock. The stream is a weird one that emerges from under a field of boulders about 250 yards back from the culvert, so these flecks must have come out from either there, or the boulders in and around the stream. The flecks were also BEFORE the culvert instead of AFTER it, which I didn't pan because of the chance metal could be wearing out from the concrete. I found them in 3 different locations behind the culvert, including one fleck about 10 feet back from it. 

And the appearance is just all wrong for slag, as well as being exceedingly bright and reflective under microscope lights, meaning this metal doesn't corrode in the water. If I can find a few more there once the weather warms, I'll test them in first HCl, then if there's no reaction, nitric. Gotta get my legs wet to pan there, so it's not happening now!


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## jobinyt (Feb 27, 2022)

There is a little gold in your area - thought to have been carried from Canada by glaciers. I've heard of no other. The material in your pictures looks 'unworked', eg, it appears there are points and thin sections attached to the beads. This indicates little movement - doubtful it was transported by glacier. Looks a little like 'splatter' from an electric arc. Very small stuff. I have a handheld USB microscope - cheap things - I find it very useful for getting highly enlarged views and images of tiny things. I find similar stuff - albeit a little larger - metal detecting prospecting/drilling sites where dozers have stripped the surface. I think it comes from the hardened edges applied to blades. You might try flattening a bead to get some sense of its hardness.


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## Alondro (Feb 27, 2022)

jobinyt said:


> There is a little gold in your area - thought to have been carried from Canada by glaciers. I've heard of no other. The material in your pictures looks 'unworked', eg, it appears there are points and thin sections attached to the beads. This indicates little movement - doubtful it was transported by glacier. Looks a little like 'splatter' from an electric arc. Very small stuff. I have a handheld USB microscope - cheap things - I find it very useful for getting highly enlarged views and images of tiny things. I find similar stuff - albeit a little larger - metal detecting prospecting/drilling sites where dozers have stripped the surface. I think it comes from the hardened edges applied to blades. You might try flattening a bead to get some sense of its hardness.


It's soft, but that doesn't say much since the pieces are tiny. 

I had access to a high-grade medical dissection scope. I got a good look at these at 200x. The sharp edges had a tell-tale 'frost' look to them, as I've seen in pictures of native PM crystals taken directly from matrix.

Like I said, it COULD be placer, just a type less typical: a big boulder or boulders dragged from Canada could be slowly wearing down and dropping bits of platinum held within it. In which case, I'd need to find that ONE or TWO boulders out of TENS OF THOUSANDS in that wide valley of rocks. XP 

I do know that the pool the stream has dug out just before it reaches the culvert has much more of this. Every sample of material I panned from there had a piece of this in it, and I was nowhere near the bottom of the sediment. Since this metal is very dense and easily panned, that must mean even more will turn up if I dug a little deeper into the fine gravels at the bottom of the pool. There are even 4 deeper pools further up the stream. One is about 4 feet deep (measured with a stick) and about 100 yards back from the culvert. I have to wait until its very warm to try that one! The water is frigid even in summer, since it emerges from under the rocks a little ways up from that. 

But if I find more flecks in that pool, it HAS to be hard-rock metal. So that's one big goal: test material from that pool.


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## Alondro (Feb 27, 2022)

jobinyt said:


> There is a little gold in your area - thought to have been carried from Canada by glaciers. I've heard of no other. The material in your pictures looks 'unworked', eg, it appears there are points and thin sections attached to the beads. This indicates little movement - doubtful it was transported by glacier. Looks a little like 'splatter' from an electric arc. Very small stuff. I have a handheld USB microscope - cheap things - I find it very useful for getting highly enlarged views and images of tiny things. I find similar stuff - albeit a little larger - metal detecting prospecting/drilling sites where dozers have stripped the surface. I think it comes from the hardened edges applied to blades. You might try flattening a bead to get some sense of its hardness.


I'm also going to be searching a few areas in northern NJ I've been suspicious of for decades. What we need to keep in mind is how ancient and tortured the geology in the northern half of NJ is. There may be fragments of old crust, upper mantle, and basalt all jumbled together in ways not found anywhere else. Indeed, the Franklin Forge-Odgensburg area has minerals found nowhere else on Earth. And there was a commercial copper mine there at one time, a highly localized concentration of metal ore. 

I suspect there are even smaller veins, or vein fragments, than that of who-knows-what scattered all over. There's one particular mountain I know which is actually an erosion-produced hill, where streams cut it down from uplifted land. The rocks are practically tilted on their sides in one part of it, then horizontal in another section, and then on the north side there's clearly the remains of a heavily eroded basalt sill, with a basalt that's slightly radioactive (got myself a nice little Geiger counter from an old lab that shut down some years ago, runs on D-batteries! Very convenient!) and contains very strange minerals of various colors all mixed together in addition to the clay-forming minerals typical of ancient basalt. 

I shall begin my explorations once more in March, and post what I find.


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## jobinyt (Feb 27, 2022)

Sounds like something well worth being curious about.


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## GuyGuyGuythe1st (Feb 28, 2022)

I live in PA. All creeks have Precious Metal. Dissolve it in nitric acid. Then precipitate with HCL. It will tell you right away if you have silver. Based off the looks tho. It looks like quartz.


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## kurtak (Feb 28, 2022)

Looks like welding slag/scale to me - the stuff that ends up on the floor of a welding shop - which gets swept washed down the (floor) drain which likely drains into flood control ditches which eventually washes through the culvert then to the creek

Or washed off a local farmers driveway where the farmer does welding repairs to his equipment

Kurt


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## Alondro (Feb 28, 2022)

kurtak said:


> Looks like welding slag/scale to me - the stuff that ends up on the floor of a welding shop - which gets swept washed down the (floor) drain which likely drains into flood control ditches which eventually washes through the culvert then to the creek
> 
> Or washed off a local farmers driveway where the farmer does welding repairs to his equipment
> 
> Kurt


Upstream is national parkland. No farms anywhere near it. I went all around the area to see if any development was nearby. There's nothing for miles. I'm pretty confident the flecks are coming out of rock nearby, likely from boulders of glacial till which are all over the place.


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## Rick & Carrie (Apr 4, 2022)

Alondro said:


> I have been doing a few pans here and there and found some interesting flecks in a small stream. They're very tiny. Here are a couple pics, sorry I can't zoom in any closer. The second has them next to a squash seed for reference. Under a microscope, they have crystalline appearance, 3 taper down to a fine point and even have parallel striations across the crystal where it looks like they formed between quartz or other crystalline mineral grains. At the wide top, they bulge into rounded portions, so they were molten as the minerals crystallized and squeezed the tiny globules into spear-head tips and rounded tops.
> 
> This must be from a rock close to where I found it. They were in gravel not even down to bedrock where the stream carved out a pit as it approached a culvert at an oblique angle, and that stream gets HEAVILY washed. Often the entire stream bed is torn up when heavy rains hit. So that means they were also placed in that location no more than a few years ago!
> 
> ...



How does this metal respond to single acids? Nitric, hydrochloric, sulfuric, and any imparted color to the acid.

Take photos of any notable solution colors and post them here. 

We can start to identify the metal based on that.


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## Alondro (Apr 6, 2022)

Rick & Carrie said:


> How does this metal respond to single acids? Nitric, hydrochloric, sulfuric, and any imparted color to the acid.
> 
> Take photos of any notable solution colors and post them here.
> 
> We can start to identify the metal based on that.


The metal crystals are so small, I'm reluctant to do any tests on them until I find some more. If I get back up there and can find a place in the stream where they've concentrated more, I'll try to get about a gram's worth. The stream has such a deep gravel base and gets churned up quite a bit in heavy rains, as it flows down from steep hills; so I expect larger bits to be deeper beneath the surface That these flecks I found were just in surface crevices indicates to me that they are still actively being released from somewhere upstream, perhaps from the springs it emerges from about 200 yards up from where I was.


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## Rick & Carrie (Apr 6, 2022)

Alondro said:


> The metal crystals are so small, I'm reluctant to do any tests on them until I find some more. If I get back up there and can find a place in the stream where they've concentrated more, I'll try to get about a gram's worth. The stream has such a deep gravel base and gets churned up quite a bit in heavy rains, as it flows down from steep hills; so I expect larger bits to be deeper beneath the surface That these flecks I found were just in surface crevices indicates to me that they are still actively being released from somewhere upstream, perhaps from the springs it emerges from about 200 yards up from where I was.



We wish you the best on it. Keep us posted with your results and further testing.


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