Hidden treasure found on public beach: 'No one knows'
A largely ignored deposit of gold has been captured in detailed photographs for the first time. For over a century, locals on New Zealand's South Island have known their black sand beaches were littered with billions of tiny flecks of the precious metal, but there have been few attempts to extract it.
Emeritus Professor Dave Craw from the University of Otago published images of the beach gold taken with an electron microscope in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics on Saturday. They will eventually be included in an atlas of beach gold deposits around the world.
The price of gold has soared in recent years, with an ounce selling this week at close to $4,000. This has sparked renewed interest in discovering and exploiting untapped deposits, but there are reasons these Kiwi hotspots have never been tapped.
Related: ⛏️ Aussie prospector reveals secret maps to find fortune
No one knows how much gold is lying out in the open on the country's beaches, but Craw believes the cost of mining it would be prohibitive because the pieces are so small.
'It could be done, but no one has bothered,' he told Yahoo News.
How much gold? No one knows.Dave Craw
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Some of the tiny particles photographed by Craw are just 10 micrometres wide and narrower than a human hair. That means, even with a pan its hard to extract because most floats to the surface of the water and is lost. There have been some small scale attempts during the depression and into the 1960s to mine West Coast gold but the work could be dangerous due to surf conditions, and extracting it was slow.
'There are probably hobbyists doing that now in places. But it's hard work, low grade, the gold is really small and hard to save, so I doubt that people will take it seriously except maybe on West Coast, especially where they are already mining sands for other reasons,' Craw said.
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