can you find gold in slate slabs

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My detector sounded off on a slab of slate today , but not on any other slate in the area , as it was imbedded in the hill and very thick there was no way I could dig it out , but only chip away at it , as I was taking a layer at a time off the sound got louder and louder, , after a few buckets full , the sound was still there but now less than half.all the fragments where placed in buckets and taken home with me. I have a small rock crusher , the crusher will break it down to powder , so I can pan it out. , can anyone out there let us know if this could be old or is there another possible reason.
I have found wire gold is slate before , but never had a detector ring like this before on slate.
any help will be appreciated

regards Len the Panner :)
1434871718_slate_sample.jpg
 
Interesting. Are there qtz veins running through the slate? Gold isnt typically hosted by slate itself rather its in small veins stringers etc within the slate
Graphitic slates shales can be weakly magnetic as can pyrrhotite mineralisation
interested to see what you find
good luck
 
Yes gold can certainly be found in slates and shales. Wally69 got a nice little piece out of some shale a few weeks back, I was there with him, he needed to borrow a scewdriver to retrieve it, lol.
 
I sometimes get a signal from the red, iron-stained slate in the haloes around reefs. I've been hanging on to them to dolly just in case, but I think it could be just the iron mineralisation.
 
choiceshot2 said:
My detector sounded off on a slab of slate today , but not on any other slate in the area , as it was imbedded in the hill and very thick there was no way I could dig it out , but only chip away at it , as I was taking a layer at a time off the sound got louder and louder, , after a few buckets full , the sound was still there but now less than half.all the fragments where placed in buckets and taken home with me. I have a small rock crusher , the crusher will break it down to powder , so I can pan it out. , can anyone out there let us know if this could be old or is there another possible reason.
I have found wire gold is slate before , but never had a detector ring like this before on slate.
any help will be appreciated

regards Len the Panner :) https://www.prospectingaustralia.com/forum/img/member-images/4771/1434871718_slate_sample.jpg

I know roughly where that was found just by looking at it r.ck ;) infact I could even tell you the mine name and dirt road its off

the round pebbles in it are pyrite bubbles witch is caused by fault drag and when exposed to the air rust into iron and in turn sets the detector off.
 
The photo seems to show cubes of pyrite, but not obviously in sufficient quantity to give such a result (pyrite is a mediochre conductor, and usually a metal detector will only respond well to native metals, e.g. gold, copper, although some sulphide mi9nerals such as galena are usually fairly conductive). However pyritic slate commonly contains a lot of graphite - could that be the cause, as it is a good conductor? Gold can occur in slate but is not partricularly common and as someone said above, more commonly occurs in quartz in the slate. However attempts have been made to mine gold-bearing slate in Victoria (e.g. Kamarooka, Wedderburn) but grades are low and recovery is difficult from graphite-rich rocks ("preg-robbing" carbon). One reason that gold can occur in slate is because the carbon in the slate can precipitate gold that is dissolved in solution in water that passes through the rock. Don't forget that a simple multimter such as you might carry in your car tool kit can be used to detect conductive minerals in a sample
 

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