World's Largest Gold Nuggets

#1 Welcome Stranger nugget weighing in at 2316 oz., found on February 5th, 1869 in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia. It was discovered by John Deason and Richard Oates just 2 inches below the surface near a root of a tree in Bulldog Gully.  It measured 2 ft x 1.02 ft in size.  Due to the size of the nugget it could not be weighed on any scales at the time and had to be broken down into 3 smaller pieces.  It was melted down shortly after finding and only recreations of the nugget made from drawings exist.  One replica of the "Welcome Stranger" nugget can be found at the City Museum in Treasury Place, in Melbourne, Victoria.  The other replica is owned by descendants of John Deason.

Welcome Stranger 

#2 Pepita Canaa nugget weighing in at 2145 oz., found Sept 13, 1983 by miners at the Serra Pelada Mine in the State of Para, Brazil.  It currently resides in the Banco Central Museum in Brazil.

Pepita Canaa 

Gold in Big Picture: Part 7 - Final

Gold bars are pictured at the Ginza Tanaka store in Tokyo October 23, 2009. (REUTERS/Issei Kato) 

Gold busts of (l-r) Chinese leaders President Hu Jintao, former president Jiang Zemin, late patriarch Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, are displayed at a gold exhibition in Beijing, China on November 8, 2009. (WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images)

Rare Gold Nugget Gallery Part 1

Nuggets are gold fragments weathered out of an original lode. They often show signs of abrasive polishing by stream action, and sometimes still contain inclusions of quartz or other lode matrix material. A gold nugget is a naturally occurring piece of native gold. Watercourses often concentrate nuggets and finer gold in placers. Nuggets are recovered by placer mining, but they are also found in residual deposits where the gold-bearing veins or lodes are weathered. Nuggets are also found in the tailings piles of previous mining operations, especially those left by gold mining dredges.

Crystalline gold from Mina Zapata, Santa Elena de Uairen, Venezuela. Size: 3.7×1.1×0.4 cm

Relative sizes of an 860 kg block of gold ore, and the 30 g of gold that can be extracted from it. Toi gold mine, Japan.

How Gold Was Formed on Earth

Like all elements of atomic numbers larger than iron, gold is a supernova nucleosynthesis process is believed to occur by. The explosion of the space in which they later formed in our solar system and the Earth in the metal-containing dust (heavy elements like gold included) scattered. Because the Earth was molten when it was just, gold exists on Earth has been in almost all the major. Gold that currently most of the planet's crust mantle today and skirmishes during the late heavy bombardment was distributed on Earth.

On Earth, gold ore is found in Precambrian rock formation time. It often occurs as a native metal, usually silver solution (ie gold, silver alloy) Metal closely. Alloys are usually 8-10% of the silver content. Electrum elemental gold with more than 20% silver. Mother with electrum silver color runs from golden-silver, silver, depending on the content. More silver, low specific gravity.

Great Golden:

This 156-troy-ounce (4.9 kg) nugget, known as the Mojave Nugget
was found by an individual prospector in the Southern California Desert
using a metal detector.

Native gold occurs as very small microscopic particles embedded in rock are often called "Fool's Gold", which is pyrite, quartz or sulfide minerals such as with. These deposits, called plaque. Also free to ply their original state in the form of metals, grain or large tumor that has reduced the rocks and alluvial deposits PLACER is found in the form of deposits with the ending. Free gold is always richer at the surface as the gold-bearing veins [clarification needed] with weathering, and streams and rivers, where it collects and can be welding by water action to form a tumor, followed by washing minerals in the dust due to oxidation.