Help reading a river bend

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Hi all, this is my first post but Ive been enjoying many topics discussed on this site incognito.

Im planning to take the family for a morning of panning once the weather warms up a bit. Ive found a nice accessible section of a river I know to be gold bearing and Im wondering if someone might be kind enough to help me work out where to start scratching around.

Ill attach an aerial photo of the bend. Would anyone be willing to mark it up for me to help me know where the best gold might be?

Thanks so much! :)

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at a wild guess, the shaded area is the old river path before erosion etc.
Rivers and creeks generally carve outwards and down with time.
Volcanic activity can raise and change the original rivers path.
But the ancient gold will be way back and up from the bend.
The later gold has been most likely deposited on the downside of an inside bend.
Decent bed rock on the outside of a bend will basically stop this erosion from happening, hence you will often see sheer rock formations on the opposite side of sharp bends.
 
Yeah, thats a serious dog leg in a short space of distance.
Obviously the bend has now hit a decent bit a rock shelf that is resisting the erosion somewhat. This is a bonus to you.
As if it was just straight, it wouldn't of had chances to build up with time in honey pockets etc.
Imagine the defined area you are now left too see...
age unknown to me, but what is obvious is how the river bend has carved outwards slowly.
Farmer Brown has utilized what flat ground he could to the boundary of depression of the bend. A rough hint.
The double dog leg between the major bends to me indicates a decent bedrock shelf that wouldn't give in to the areas erosion of time at the same rate.
Bonus again, as this can be a good spot for deposits, crevices etc. (Honey pots) for an average of the river.
If this creek/river dose hold gold, you will find it peppered anywhere along it, but why dig randomly anywhere in the middle with no reason.
The inner dog leg may continue way up to the paddock.
At an average, if you where to chase the gold in a higher yeild, it would start where I said in the second pic backup towards the first pic shaded area.
Following that bedrock shelf that didn't give in to erosion as easily as the rest if the bend.
 
Not you, but some people cant grasp the fact that Australia is still growing... slowly but UPWARDS!
and beleive the water has slowly been sucked back into the ocean.
As a mountain grows higher, the water will always take the shortest path downward.
Ophir is a prime example. River beds 100's above where you stand.
And some think the water has re seeded.
That bit of a mountain has been pushed up , and the river has just simply taken the quickest lazy way down hill with time.
hence good gold can be found up high above the water line now.
 
mudgee hunter said:
Not you, but some people cant grasp the fact that Australia is still growing... slowly but UPWARDS!
and beleive the water has slowly been sucked back into the ocean.
As a mountain grows higher, the water will always take the shortest path downward.
Ophir is a prime example. River beds 100's above where you stand.
And some think the water has re seeded.
That bit of a mountain has been pushed up , and the river has just simply taken the quickest lazy way down hill with time.
hence good gold can be found up high above the water line now.

interesting you say that how do you explain shells 140km inland from the nearest sea at an elevation of 420 meters above seal level ?
 
Ok, maybe im not the best for choice of wording.
The amount of water on Earth hasn't changed.
And what I was trying to say that standing at tne base of a mountain looking up at the 420m mark, the ocean wasnt up there.
That has been pushed up with time etc.
even where you stand has been pushed up.
This is a measure from the earths core.
And where people get a bit confused.
as it grew from once being under water and started breaking above any tidal influence, the water was basically pushed back,
And the old seabed went up with it.
In doing so, so did the rest of Australia, just more so in some area than others.
So we might skip forward a few millions years now to a million years ago..
now just fresh water wraps its way around the mountain, and say this creek holds gold being deposited from above it.
as it still growing, its shifts the creek slowly to a lower simpler path, thus leaving the old creek bed above the new path. (Ancient river bed)
and some of the mountains where still highly actively growing, volcanoes etc. That spued larva out that, like the water took the easiest way down and followed the creek.
covering it up and basically burying it over, hiding the original creek all together in some places. (Lead) basalt etc.
this activity could even change the original creeks path and direction.
Im sure there is members that can even name this periods etc.
But this is my best interpretation of it.
 
mudgee hunter said:
Ok, maybe im not the best for choice of wording.
The amount of water on Earth hasn't changed.
And what I was trying to say that standing at tne base of a mountain looking up at the 420m mark, the ocean wasnt up there.
That has been pushed up with time etc.
even where you stand has been pushed up.
This is a measure from the earths core.
And where people get a bit confused.
as it grew from once being under water and started breaking above any tidal influence, the water was basically pushed back,
And the old seabed went up with it.
In doing so, so did the rest of Australia, just more so in some area than others.
So we might skip forward a few millions years now to a million years ago..
now just fresh water wraps its way around the mountain, and say this creek holds gold being deposited from above it.
as it still growing, its shifts the creek slowly to a lower simpler path, thus leaving the old creek bed above the new path. (Ancient river bed)
and some of the mountains where still highly actively growing, volcanoes etc. That spued larva out that, like the water took the easiest way down and followed the creek.
covering it up and basically burying it over, hiding the original creek all together in some places. (Lead) basalt etc.
this activity could even change the original creeks path and direction.
Im sure there is members that can even name this periods etc.
But this is my best interpretation of it.
Your basic idea is correct, except that it is more cyclic, not one continuous uplift process over time. But uplift has been true for Australia for some time now (because Australia is colliding with SE Asia around Timor and Ambon - Timor is a bit of scraped-up sea floor). Another factor that is varying is sea level (eg aborigines could originally walk from Port Moresby to Hobart without using boats or swimming). This commonly varies by 200 m or so over time, and cycles with the ice ages in 50,000 year cycles (strictly "glacial periods", we have been in an ice age for more than a million years). Other factors, especially in the northern hemisphere, include ice caps in the glacial periods - 4 km of ice depresses land, and it is still re-bounding, leaving successive parallel beach deposits. The rivers we mine (and the palaeorivers) have been depositing gold mostly over more than the last 30 million years. So there has been a complex interplay of uplift and sea level variation. To put it in perspective, New Zealand was a flat plain with no mountains 900,000 years ago. So river gravels and marine fossils on hill-tops should not surprise you (a bit more than one million years ago the shoreline was just south of Ballarat, the Otway Ranges were an island - 10,000 years ago there was no Port Phillip Bay just a river flowing out through the heads beside which aborigines camped....). The Murray Basin used to be an inland sea, entrance near the Murray mouth, extending east to around Albury.
 
Cheers, good read. My bad for saying continually, meant over the next 1000 000 years etc with a few more volcanic explos here and there, the odd meteor hitting us etc... all in good time.
still waiting for another solid gold meteorite to hit us and take my jack hammer to it! :)
 
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