Author: Tianya loves science
On October 27, the news of the discovery of a huge gold mine in Henan was instantly on the hot search.
According to the news, the current preliminary estimate is 31.55 tons, worth more than 2 billion US dollars, and in two months, it is expected to break through 50 tons, worth 3.3 billion US dollars, more than 20 billion yuan.
For a while, the area around Tongbai Mountain in Henan seemed to give people the feeling of gold everywhere. A large number of netizens are rubbing their fists and saying that they want to organize a group to go to Henan to explore gold, and it seems that the wave of gold rush in the western United States more than 100 years ago will appear in the Central Plains.
Is it that easy to find gold? Leaving aside any legal restrictions, let's look at the feasibility of individual gold exploration from a scientific point of view.
First, we need to know how gold on Earth is currently distributed. Gold was not formed on Earth, it fell to Earth with asteroids from outer space. How many? Don't believe it, the total is about 400 million tons! There are about 7 billion people in the world, and each person can share at least 550 tons of gold! Is there more sand under your feet? Unfortunately, because the early Earth was in a state of melting, and the density of gold was large, over the long years, 99% gradually sank to the core of the Earth. Only about 1% of gold rises above the Earth's crust with geological action.
Early Earth volcanoes were active, and magma carried small amounts of gold along the fissures to the surface, and then through hundreds of millions of years of geotectonics and regional metamorphism, the first gold sources were formed. Under the countless orogeny movements and long-term geological action, gold has been migrated and gradually enriched, which is called "rock gold" in geology.
So don't you take a shovel, chisel east and west to find gold? Scientists will tell you that think too much! Even if you graduate from a geological school, if you have not been in the field for many years and have accumulated a wealth of field work experience, it is possible to find it. Moreover, among the rock gold, the gold content is also very low, when the gold content in the rock is three grams per ton, there is industrial mining value, how many people have the ability to pry these tons of gold? The chances of digging up gold alone are much lower than the chances of digging diamonds, and some of the good luck is just sneaking up on the geologists to find some bits and pieces, and even then, this kind of luck is similar to a blind cat running into a dead rat.
Of course, there is also a way to find it in the water. In the rock-gold-rich zone, the shallow surface of the rock gold after hundreds of millions of years of weathering, erosion and oxidation, the stable nature of the gold in the rock is dissociated into a single body; if the area happens to be a place with abundant rainfall, in the process of water flow, because of its proportion, it is deposited in the stable part of the water flow to form a sand gold mine. Sand gold mainly exists in the Quaternary contact zone with bedrock, and has industrial mining value when the gold content is 0.5 g/m3.
So if you know that there are gold-producing rocks upstream, you might find them in the Quaternary strata downstream. Find a river, that is, a place with a relatively large quaternary thickness, use a steel pipe with a diameter of about 20 cm thick, try your best to beat down, until the bedrock, and then try your best to pull the steel pipe out, and then pour out the gravel inside, put it on the plate and use the water over and over again, if you are lucky enough, you can find 0.5 grams of gold after you have scooped up about a cubic meter of gravel, which is estimated to be smaller than a grain of rice.
How about it, does it feel easy? In short, it is almost impossible to recreate the era of gold with a plate like the era when gold was found on a plate more than 100 years ago in San Francisco.
Some people may ask, what about dog head gold? In the process of sand gold ore formation, sand gold will absorb each other - gold does have this affinity, in the river of thousands of years, gold will be like a snowball gathered, from small to large, forming a "collection" of different sizes, that is, dog head gold. Dog head gold inside more stones and impurities, and potholes, is due to the environment produced mostly in the sand grains rich in groundwater, so it is rich in sand grains, the surface potholes are also due to the inlay of sand stones, the later sand stones fell, leaving sand stones and other shapes of potholes on the surface. Dog head gold is the result of natural evolution over hundreds of millions of years, and the chance of picking up dog head gold is much lower than the chance of winning the lottery jackpot.
Dog head gold found in Xinjiang in 2015 weighs about 7.8 kilograms
In the water and downstream basins of Hunan Province, there are many areas with dog head gold in China. According to records, Baiyu County in Sichuan Province, Nanzheng County and Ankang County in Shaanxi Province, Huma County in Heilongjiang Province, Huadian County in Jilin Province, Datong County in Qinghai Province, Qumalai County in Qinghai Province, Zhaoyuan City in Shandong Province, Zunhua County in Hebei Province, etc., have all found dog head gold, and the records of successive dynasties show that there are only more than a thousand pieces in total, of which Henan found that the documentation record of dog head gold is the least, so it seems that the idea of wanting to go to Henan to find dog head gold seems to be good to think about.
Cores taken from geological exploration in Henan
How hard is it to find gold? We can understand it through the data said by Wang Jianguang, president of the First Institute of Geological Survey of Henan Province. The 35 members of their team spent a full 10 years, invested 159 million yuan in exploration funds, filled in 100 square kilometers of geological maps, built 160 drill holes, drilled 115,000 meters, and probed 22,000 cubic meters. Among them, the deepest drill hole in 2013 reached 1700 meters, and the funds spent on this drill hole exceeded 2 million yuan.
Therefore, ordinary people, just be a melon eater. There are melons to eat, which is already quite good.