The Largest Single Gold Discovery Ever Made in the United States

The Largest Single Gold Discovery Ever Made in the United States In 1849, tens of thousands of men walked west along the Humboldt River on the California Trail. They camped on ground holding more gold than anything else on the continent, and none of them saw it. Neither did the prospectors who came after, or the assayers who tested the rock and wrote it off as barren. They weren't careless. The gold at Carlin sits in particles smaller than a tenth of a micron — smaller than the wavelength of the light you would need to see them. You cannot pan it. There is no vein to follow. Through 1964, the entire district had produced about 22,000 ounces. Then a Newmont geologist named John Livermore read a USGS paper nobody in industry had taken seriously, met its author in a hotel bar in Ely, and went looking for gold he knew he would never see. In October 1961 he filed claims on a four-million-ounce orebody. That orebody is now part of something that has produced more than 100 million ounces, with roughly 100 million more still in the ground. This is how a continental rift, a soluble limestone, a thrust fault that arrived 300 million years early, and a single pulse of Eocene groundwater built the largest gold discovery in American history — and how a continent-scale extension event came within a few hundred feet of erasing all of it. Livermore never earned a cent from it. He got a thank-you note. GeoScope takes apart the places the Earth built only once. Subscribe, and the next one finds you. #geology #gold #Nevada