Effects of last ice age in GT

People who detect in the Golden Triangle and many other places, find a layer of compacted gravel or clay down about 300 to 450mm. The gravel indicates to me there must have been some major erosion effects going on many years ago. Is it possible that this is one the erosion effects of the last ice age (20-30,000 years ago)?

The Neolithic period prohibition on the use of hay bails and silt fence created the biggest environmental erosion disaster known to mankind........I think the yanks call it the Grand Canyon

Your question makes me wonder if our hobby in the GT could have been severely disrupted by a couple of Neanderthals introducing a carbon tax.

(this is not intended incite political debate on the forum)

I believe most if not all of Vic GT was under sea hundreds of millions if not billions of years ago. The ground is sedimentary deposited by vast water movement and has granitic plutons popping up here and there. As massive water movement and erosion took place river beds were created and eroded rich gold was deposited in them giving the name to alluvial gold. Over the Millenia those river beds were covered over by further erosion creating deep alluvial leads and shallow alluvial leads. The ground was compressed in an East West direction. Deep leads are those that we can't determine from current lie of the ground and can be 100's of meters and even klms deep. The old timers chased these deep leads after they found all the shallow gold, as well as host quartz mining. As detectorists we are looking for shallow alluvial leads close to the surface. These can be at any depth, not just 300 to 450mm. We are also interested in more recent shed gold from surface or shallow gold bearing reefs.
I'm no expert and happy for anyone to correct this simplified explanation. Cheers

Highway1 said:

People who detect in the Golden Triangle and many other places, find a layer of compacted gravel or clay down about 300 to 450mm. The gravel indicates to me there must have been some major erosion effects going on many years ago. Is it possible that this is one the erosion effects of the last ice age (20-30,000 years ago)?

Click to expand...

How much detail can you handle?
REGOLITH MAPPING AT BENDIGO, AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO GOLD IN CENTRAL VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA:
http://www.crcleme.org.au/Pubs/Advancesinregolith/Kotsonis_Joyce.pdf

(Five pages of maps and geo-speak explanation)

Thank you for your answers, grubstake I looked at the Regolith Mapping of Bendigo article. It is very detailed and I will not try to say I understand it, even though I have read similar articles they are all incredibly detailed and complicated, no doubt these zones are what gold miners look at.
What interests me is the late Tertiary age up to now, which is probably not really mentioned very much. In other words the zone our detectors work in. Along side my house (in gold country) we dug trenches for various service, (power, water etc). The top 200-250mm was clay, then a 100mm of layer of quartz, another 150mm layer of clay, another 80mm of quartz. Near by is a small quartz reef plus a sedimentary rock reef.
I imagine the clays are from a time of rain and vegetable grow, and the quartz layers from a time where the quartz reef broke down due to heat or cold. The concentrated quartz was washed down possibly due to very heavey rain or melting ice to form a layer of predominately small 10-15mm quartz pieces. In the shallow gold workings here the old timers dug down into these quartz layers looking for gold.
Our detectors work in 300-450mm typically, so therefore are we looking at 20-30,000 years of erosion or 1 million years of erosion?
As I walk around with my detector I ponder what the answer is, and if we under stood this more we all might find more gold.
Cheers