Fridays Rock! Gold! Au

Now that I am back in Japan I have access to Hive account@tokyowomanslife and my gem and mineral collection. I'll be posting these every Friday thanks to Hive account@nat-expressions & Hive account@bitfiend for creating the #Fridaysrock and #Rockhound tags.

Gold!

This is a thumbnail specimen of gold in quartz I purchased 2 years ago at the Quartzite, AZ Desert Gardens, a gem & mineral show that happens every January. In fact the whole town becomes one of the world's largest gem and mineral shows, which includes about 10 - year-round rock shops and 5 shows.

Anyway, this gold specimen was one of 3 I purchased. It was also the best of the three. The specimens all came from Timmons, Ontario, Canada a gold mining town. The gentleman I purchased it from was a Canadian selling at the show. He spoke only broken English, French being his native tongue. Or maybe it was a trick to get me to pay full price!? He said that they were specimens that he had personally mined and they were too amazing to pass up. He did have many other, larger and smaller specimens but I had many other minerals to buy that day so I settled on 3. I don't recall off of the top of my head, but I think I paid $75 for this one. We just sold it the other day for about double that.

Gold is an incredible element. It is formed in the hearts of supernovas and through collisions with neutron stars, like many other complex minerals. It's one of the heaviest minerals with a specific gravity of 19.32 which is more than twice that of iron at 7.87. When you drop even a small gold picker the size of a grain of rice into your hand you can feel the weight of it. There is a saying among gold prospectors, gold rides an iron horse. What that means is often where you find iron and heavier minerals you will find gold as they travel together.

It is believed that most gold found by man was deposited fairly recently by asteroid strikes. Being that gold is so heavy it wants to travel down into the core of the earth. So the gold that impacted while the earth formed rests in the core, while recent impacts haven't given it enough time to make its way down there yet. Having said that, the Vredefort crater impact that produced South Africa's gold fields is said to be around 2 billion years old.

One of the ways gold is deposited is through a process called hydrothermal circulation. As tectonic plates move water inside is superheated under intense pressure and forced upwards. During the process it picks up various minerals along the way and deposits them in cracks and vugs(pockets) in rocks. This is also the process that forms many gems and minerals. That is why you find gold in veins of quartz and other rocks.

Thank for reading and enjoy your Friday!