# First tiny nugget found in sandy NJ streambed!



## Alondro (Mar 11, 2022)

I have found my first little nugget! I'll have to test it to see what it's made of. But, it was in highly acidic iron-rich sand in contact with acidic marshy stream water so corrosive to metal that even brass pennies are eaten away within a few years! (brass pennies in the flowing streams are reduced to paper-thin wafers within 3 years and vanish after that!) I know for a fact that aluminum is swiftly destroyed, and lead develops a thick yellow-gray crust. Silver, on the other hand, stays very shiny in this environment (I've found some silver dimes metal detecting, and they were so bright it was like they'd just fallen yesterday.) So this could be a placer silver or platinum nugget from the glaciers long ago!




It was, as expected, in the large black sand deposit at the bottom of the hill. I had to sift the black sand to find it, since that black sand has a large amount of hematite and other heavy dark crystalline material. 

Now, this nugget was just barely small enough to fit through the screen of my fine classifier... which means there could be larger ones as I go deeper into the black sand layer! I'll need to check the mid-size gravel very carefully. I've only just begun to prospect the location!


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## orvi (Mar 12, 2022)

Photo isn´t particularly sharp, but it does not look like gold to me


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## Alondro (Mar 12, 2022)

orvi said:


> Photo isn´t particularly sharp, but it does not look like gold to me


It's not. It is either silver or platinum. I'm guessing platinum since gold and platinum nuggets have been found scattered all over this part of the Northeast from glacial till, for which moraines are located in several places in my county.


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## Alondro (Mar 13, 2022)

orvi said:


> Photo isn´t particularly sharp, but it does not look like gold to me


Got a much better picture today in bright sunshine. My camera can zoom quite a bit better with sunlight. It doesn't work well with artificial light for some reason. I'll be panning to hopefully find more from that spot once the ground re-thaws. It all froze solid last night and it's frigid and windy today.


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## orvi (Mar 13, 2022)

I never heard of placer silver, but i do not know much about it. But if it is platinum (fully possible in the US), congratulations  it is not very hard to get it zapped with XRF to show metals involved 
From the previous picture, it looked more like pyrite in some piece of rock, I apologize for misinterpretation


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## Ohiogoldfever (Mar 13, 2022)

That’s awesome. I’m gonna bet it is Platinum. I have seen a handful of platinum nuggets (online) and it looks good in comparison.


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## Alondro (Mar 14, 2022)

orvi said:


> I never heard of placer silver, but i do not know much about it. But if it is platinum (fully possible in the US), congratulations  it is not very hard to get it zapped with XRF to show metals involved
> From the previous picture, it looked more like pyrite in some piece of rock, I apologize for misinterpretation


I had to wait for a sunny day. Even with a bright flashlight, zooming in drastically discolored the lighting. Even the dime looks weird in the original picture. It had been cloudy and cold and rainy/snowy here much of last week.

There is placer silver in locations where native silver exists, but it's pretty uncommon, and there's never been a trace of it in the Northeast USA. We have some partially crystalline silver sulfide ores in small pockets and veins in North Jersey near the ancient worn down volcanic deposits (my cousin found a chunk of it back in the 80's.), but those don't look the least bit metallic. 

So yeah, a placer Pt nugget is most likely. And to find it in just the first 2 pans in the top layer of the black sand... heh heh heh, that's promising indeed! I've barely scratched the surface in that sand pit. I'd long suspected there was glacial till mixed in there. And not just there. There's a central ridge in South Jersey covered in thick layers of rounded pebbles. My suspicion is that there are concentrated pockets of till all along it where the ancient high sea levels washed down material from the glaciers from the Appalachians and melting glaciers and tossed it up against that sedimentary ridge. It's clearly a massive dune/surge zone, because the bedrock there is HUNDREDS of feet below the surface. We're talking about MULTIPLE layers of glaciation material, thrown up and mixed and redeposited over and over. And as streams cut through the layers, especially where sand and gravel pits have been dug, or dirt bike paths expose the sand to erosion, the heavys are rolled down during torrential rains and get trapped in the little deltas formed from the running water. 

I'll be doing some more panning there this week. Not sure which day yet, since I have a lot more to do with a house for sale!


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## orvi (Mar 14, 2022)

Finding nuggets in a sand pit sounds quite rich  i am hobby prospector for 5 years now, and if I was ever to find a nugget like this one, it layed perfectly on the bottom of the creek, max 5 cm from the bedrock. never in sand 

Sometimes, river tend to deposit the material into several layers over the bottom. Mainly if the river do not have the steep and flow velocity to move the gravel from the top to the bottom, during the flood. But I never found piece this big in that type of deposit. Considering the platinum is even more dense than gold... 
But as it is said numerous times, gold is where you find it


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## Alondro (Mar 18, 2022)

orvi said:


> Finding nuggets in a sand pit sounds quite rich  i am hobby prospector for 5 years now, and if I was ever to find a nugget like this one, it layed perfectly on the bottom of the creek, max 5 cm from the bedrock. never in sand
> 
> Sometimes, river tend to deposit the material into several layers over the bottom. Mainly if the river do not have the steep and flow velocity to move the gravel from the top to the bottom, during the flood. But I never found piece this big in that type of deposit. Considering the platinum is even more dense than gold...
> But as it is said numerous times, gold is where you find it


And that little tidbit seems to be the only one! I've been panning out the black sand layer and there's nothing else large enough to confirm. I'll be processing the black sands I have and see if there are any useful lead-silver sulfides in there. I see a lot of what looks to be galena sand.


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## Alondro (May 11, 2022)

Two tiny flecks of gold are confirmed from the first test of material I took in Bordentown, NJ, from old glacial moraine deposits.

I'll see if I can get a picture of them when I have really bright sunlight, which is the only chance of my camera being able to zoom in on such tiny bits... and of course the next couple days are going to be cloudy.

I'm encouraged, because this was just a random half bucket of material from the bed a little trickle of a streamlet in a gully between two moraine mounds. There's a larger stream emerging from a spring that has several 2-3 foot-deep catches in another gully (measured with a stick), but the sides are steep and made of slippery clay. I need to go on a day when I can wade in. 

It's an interesting area, with lots of this loose glacial till on top of hard iron-rich clay. So there is a lot of groundwater that emerges from the sides of gullies as little springs, with rocks and boulders from the glacial material tumbling and settling into the gullies. I also want to test the alluvial material near the end of the gullies, but that area's overgrown with wild roses and poison ivy... ehhhhhhh... I'd get torn up and covered in a rash.  I'll wait til winter to get a few scoops of that.


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## Alondro (May 13, 2022)

Picture of the gold, a found a few additional flecks in another pan of the material, so they're in here too! The little yellow crystal to the left of the gold flecks is a tiny topaz I also found in the material. You can never tell what you're going to find in glacial til, especially from glaciers that dragged stuff all the way from Ontario to NJ! I've also found lots of broken fragments of anthracite coal and shale, which clearly came from the north-central PA region, where such minerals are plentiful, as well as an iron-rich garnet schist from Eastern PA. Those moraines have pieces of every bit of geology between Canada and NJ all mixed together.


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## Shark (May 13, 2022)

Years ago we would check any corrugated road tiles in the area. They form a sluice when it rains. Back in the 1970’s there was an old man about 50 miles south of me that would clean out around 1/4 oz every time they got a hard rain. It took him a week to make the rounds but he enjoyed it very much.


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## Alondro (May 13, 2022)

Shark said:


> Years ago we would check any corrugated road tiles in the area. They form a sluice when it rains. Back in the 1970’s there was an old man about 50 miles south of me that would clean out around 1/4 oz every time they got a hard rain. It took him a week to make the rounds but he enjoyed it very much.


Our roads didn't have corrugations on the sides until recently (rumble strips).

I finished the last pan's worth of material this afternoon: two more gold flecks, a fair amount of very fine gold mixed into the black sands, and a larger piece of what appears to be platinum. It's heavy (was at the very bottom of the fine gravel fraction when that was panned) and incredibly shiny, polished from the glacial grinding and then the tumbling action of the water in the stream.


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## Shark (May 13, 2022)

I am talking about the pipe that run under the roads. But those grooves along the sides may collect some as well. Gold is where you find if it is ditches or electronics. We just have to search for it.


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## Alondro (May 14, 2022)

Shark said:


> I am talking about the pipe that run under the roads. But those grooves along the sides may collect some as well. Gold is where you find if it is ditches or electronics. We just have to search for it.


Ah, those culverts. I don't know how many of those are used around my area that are large enough to access. Most larger streams have regular bridges now.


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