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Did This Have An Effect On Idaho Gold?


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I just read with interest an event that changed the landscape of Eastern Washington State.  There is some mention of Montana so these events may have changed where gold has been moved and where it is left.

 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/devastating-ice-age-floods-that-occurred-in-the-pacific-northwest-fascinate-scientists-180979749/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily-dek&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20220419-daily-dek&spMailingID=46715100&spUserID=MTMxNjg2MzE5MzQ5NgS2&spJobID=2222101253&spReportId=MjIyMjEwMTI1MwS2 

 

A little bit more research provided a more detailed link.

 

https://hugefloods.com/Scablands.html 

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There are things that can be said, but i must say that I have no specific knowledge of gold related to the paleo-lakes and the ensuing floods.

It occurs to me that gold-bearing stream discharges from mountains ringing the lake would form deltas where they reached the shores.  When the lake drained, much of this sediment would be eroded away.  As these deltas would be at the edges of the lakes, they might escape catastrophic erosion and  leave some gold behind.  

This is an exploration concept not a prediction.  Sometimes exploration concepts are profitable.  Often they are not.  Without specific knowledge of discharge-related gold occurrences you'd probably do better ignoring the floods and seeking an exploration concept related to a known traditional gold occurrence.

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Northern Nevada is full of dried up remnants of the inland seas and huge lakes left by the Canadian flooding. There are not only old beach lines and related placers everywhere, but quite a few remnants of high velocity river channels. I have found many places where there are 1-2 foot very smooth rounded cobbles, in a mix of compositions entirely unrelated to the underlying bedrock. Signs of the last glacial age and the subsequent warming are everywhere. This not only has created many small placer deposits, but the salt/alkali conditions that are so prevalent in Nevada and Utah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lahontan

https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/m11

https://pubs.usgs.gov/mf/1999/mf-2323/mf2323.pdf

98683648-9D01-4CD4-9213-A642FD0D3CC6.jpeg

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Nick Zentner has a lot of good videos on these floods. They've dated them using ash layers and glacial erratics. Much of this water exitted through the Columbia River gorge but there was also another massive flood through Hells Canyon on the Snake River from ancient Lake Bonneville.

There are some new theories that it wasn't just ice dams breaking at glacial lakes Missoula and Columbia, but a massive meteorite hitting the ice field around Prince George.

On that subject, there is a new theory about a massive meteorite hitting Michigan ice sheets and ejecting a massive cloud of ice projectiles into low Earth orbit. These rained down onto the continent and may have been the reason for the megafauna extinction such as mammoths and giant ground sloths, as well as potentially some pre Clovis human cultures. The ejecta may be responsible for "Carolina Bays" across half the US, recently revealed by LIDAR.

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jasong, Nick Zenter is one of the best most interesting presenters of ancient history in parts of the West. There is also a theory of a huge Lake Montana in Canada also  breaking out of an ice dam and creating a huge flood flowing out the St. Lawrence Seaway. When much sea ice was locked up on land during the last Ice Age, the oceans were up to 300 feet below current sea levels. You can imagine that many villages and towns were built along areas that are now under water. Many of the large releases of major large bodies of water would have flooded many of the low lying towns and villages. We know some about the Ice Age lakes here on our continent, how many more of this type of event happened around the rest of the world?     

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The way the gold got massively moved around up here by glaciation and glacial rivers, and glacial dams bursting, I'd say yes.  

I've seen glacial striations on the bedrock of rich placer channels marking where the glaciers ground down to solid bottom and carried off the gold that was once part of a rich channel, only to carry off and deposit said gold to some unknown location. (The local miners called them robber glaciers--the miners would be on bonanza gold in a channel, only to make their next excavation to bedrock to find no gold whatsoever, only the telltale cuts in the bedrock to show a glacier had swept away the gold.)

I just got back from detecting some nuggets in an area of a glacial dam blowout deposition (more like what the information you provided relates to I believe) where there's almost no black sand in the deposit, but nuggets and gold are plentiful in a surface deposit and there are car size boulders everywhere and huge bedrock chunks the size of garages and larger, just imagine the volume of that water to move rock of that size? As well, the water either cut through ancient channels as it excavated downward, or it scooped out shallower deposits and blew them across a larger area. (The gold is also flat, having been hammered by all of that large rock.)

I'm no geologist, but if the same forces were at work in Idaho, then yes, it's likely indeed. (I chased some gold in Idaho quite a few years back, fun times.)

All the best,

Lanny

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