There’s this channel on YouTube called Golden Bear Media - their videos are all about gold prospecting, and they all take place on some unnamed island; the format is pretty similar across all of the uploads and it goes like this:
Metal detector makes noises over a patch of gritty earth; after a few minutes of digging with (what looks to me like) inappropriate tools, the person digging reaches into the hole and pulls out a nugget of gold the size of a potato.
Here’s a typical example:
To me, there’s just a whiff of bullshit in these videos. A few of the things that don’t quite seem right to me are:
[ul]
[li]The sound on the metal detector doesn’t really seem to be properly in sync with the movement - I watch quite a lot of metal detecting videos and I know there are different modes, but something seems off with the correlation between sound and action[/li][li]The nuggets just look too perfect and rounded compared to the matrix rock in which they are supposedly being found - they are rounded and pebble-like, whereas the rock and soil being dug is shale-like layers[/li][li]There’s always a join in the video between the digging and the reveal of the nugget[/li][li]There’s something about the heft of the nuggets, that looks wrong - in some shots, it looks to me like they are handling them in such way to make them appear heavier than they really are[/li][li]The people digging up the nuggets seem pretty unexcited to be finding their own body weight in gold every day[/li][/ul]
What do the good skeptical folks of the SDMB think?
Gold is very heavy. If you’ve never handled an ingot, and only know it from jewellery, single coins and laughably bad film depictions, you might not get how heavy it can be.
Also, not sure about the rounding, lots of factors could be at work there, a nugget doesn’t have to match the surrounding rocks as it’s got very different properties.
Having said that, nothing else about what you said seems wrong, and I’d say trust your gut.
FWIW, It looks pretty fake to me, too, BTW. I’d expect to find a well-rounded nugget like that snug in a bed of larger cobbles, not in sand. The usual size relationship is that the gold is hydraulically equivalent to its matrix, that holds for both placer deposits and fossilized placers like the Witwatersrand gold - but not for vein gold.
That looks decidedly odd. I feel pretty sure that when you do find gold it’s not easy to recognize as gold. This stuff looks like the huge shiny nuggets you’d see in Scrooge McDuck’s strongroom. Weird’
BTW, read the blurb below the vid and it’s obvious bullshit. The government is trying to get out the rebels so it’s safe to mine the gold (and diamonds!) Yet they stroll in with women in tights? Please…
It was a couple minutes of entertainment looking at the linked video and laughing. Sure, we’re pulling millions of dollars out of the ground with minimal work, but really, that’s not as important as showing it on youtube so that everyone else in the world can figure out where it is? Oh, and the government totally knows all this gold is there, and is greedy for it, but is just, um, pretending it’s not there for uh, reasons. Oh, OK, it’s because the rebels are so powerful they can chase off even the kind of heavily-armed expedition that could be financed by all that gold. Too bad the rebels aren’t strong enough to take on a single woman armed with a pick.
You really don’t need a technical analysis to figure out what the problem with the supposed story is.
But I’m sure there’s plenty of technical critique, too. For instance, the blurb below is total BS. That stream does not regularly flash flood (if it did, how does all that vegetation stay growing right on the edge of the ‘low’ water? Also you don’t generally get flash floods in areas where there’s enough year-round rainfall to support that kind of moderately lush forest). I’m not sure where the rebel-infested ‘island’ is supposed to be. but the plants look awfully like a temperate forest. Which there really isn’t that much of in whatever rebel-infested tropical islands exist today.
The nugget they pull out is like a rock, completely separate from the surrounding soil. Is that how gold is found? I thought it’s mostly in the form of a vein in other rock. What they’re doing looks more like digging potatoes out of the ground.
Plus, finding a single nugget of the size shown in the picture was the sort of thing to kick off the 1849 California Gold Rush, or later gold rushes elsewhere. How is this area not over run with treasure seekers?
In short, I’m no geologist, but I think the video is bullshit. Nice job getting views, though.
Oh, it is definitely recognizable as gold! Bright and shiny. Of course everything I have seen is like grains of sand, but even that stands out when washed.
I once pulled a nice fool’s gold nugget out of the Rocky River near Cleveland. A curious fisherman asked what I was hunting for. I held up the nugget and he really flipped.
Speaking of which, I’ve never hunted for gold, but I spent several years trying to reclaim our back yard. If one were going to be breaking up big rocks into smaller ones, then scoop them out of a hole by hand, wouldn’t one be advised to bring along a pair of work gloves?
Yeah, I thought that bit had a certain aroma to it too - so there are rebels in this area; they’re proving difficult for the government to remove (so presumably they are armed and unruly), but they just let strangers wander in and dig up the gold potatoes. Seems more likely the rebels would just take the gold off the visiting strangers and maybe murder them
The show Gold Rushdid one of their off season series about gold mining in New Guinea. The situation was similar, the rebels are a threat, but there’s an uneasy balance of power, and I assume a lot of behind the scenes bribery that keep people safe. The rebels seem to be mainly armed with machetes, I’m sure visitors bring guns.
Gold Rush seems to be largely on the up and up. Not so sure about this Golden Beard thing.