Mother lode is a principal vein or zone of gold or silver ore. The term is also used colloquially to refer to the real or imaginary origin of something valuable or in great abundance.
Newmont Corporation is an American gold mining company based in Greenwood Village, Colorado. It is the world's largest gold mining corporation. Incorporated in 1921, it owns gold mines in Nevada, Colorado, Ontario, Quebec, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Australia, Ghana, Argentina, Peru, and Suriname. In addition to gold, Newmont mines copper, silver, zinc and lead.
In geology, a terrane is a crust fragment formed on a tectonic plate and accreted or "sutured" to crust lying on another plate. The crustal block or fragment preserves its distinctive geologic history, which is different from the surrounding areas—hence the term "exotic" terrane. The suture zone between a terrane and the crust it attaches to is usually identifiable as a fault. A sedimentary deposit that buries the contact of the terrane with adjacent rock is called an overlap formation. An igneous intrusion that has intruded and obscured the contact of a terrane with adjacent rock is called a stitching pluton.
Porphyry copper deposits are copper ore bodies that are formed from hydrothermal fluids that originate from a voluminous magma chamber several kilometers below the deposit itself. Predating or associated with those fluids are vertical dikes of porphyritic intrusive rocks from which this deposit type derives its name. In later stages, circulating meteoric fluids may interact with the magmatic fluids. Successive envelopes of hydrothermal alteration typically enclose a core of disseminated ore minerals in often stockwork-forming hairline fractures and veins. Because of their large volume, porphyry orebodies can be economic from copper concentrations as low as 0.15% copper and can have economic amounts of by-products such as molybdenum, silver, and gold. In some mines, those metals are the main product.
The Smartville Block, also called the Smartville Ophiolite, Smartville Complex, or Smartville Intrusive Complex, is a geologic terrane formed in the ocean from a volcanic island arc that was accreted onto the North American Plate during the late Jurassic. The collision created sufficient crustal heating to drive mineral-laden water up through numerous fissures along the contact zone. When these cooled, among the precipitating minerals was gold. Associated with the Western Metamorphic Belt of the Sierra Nevada foothills it extends from the central Sierra Nevada mountain range, due west, under a section of the Central Valley and California Coast Ranges, in northern California. The ophiolitic sequence found in this terrane is one of several major ophiolites found in California. Ophiolites are crustal and upper-mantle rocks from the ocean floor that have been moved on land. Ophiolites have been studied extensively regarding the movement of crustal rocks by plate tectonics.
Eldridge Moores was an American geologist. He specialized in the understanding of ophiolites and the geology of the continental crust of the Western United States and Tethyan belt, the geology of Greece, Cyprus, and Pakistan, and the tectonic development of the Sierra Nevada and the Alpine - Himalayan systems.
In the United States, gold mining has taken place continually since the discovery of gold at the Reed farm in North Carolina in 1799. The first documented occurrence of gold was in Virginia in 1782. Some minor gold production took place in North Carolina as early as 1793, but created no excitement. The discovery on the Reed farm in 1799 which was identified as gold in 1802 and subsequently mined marked the first commercial production.
Silver mining in the United States began on a major scale with the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1858. The industry suffered greatly from the demonetization of silver in 1873 by the Coinage Act of 1873, known pejoratively as the "Crime of 73", but silver mining continues today.
Gold mining in Colorado, a state of the United States, has been an industry since 1858. It also played a key role in the establishment of the state of Colorado.
Silver mining in Colorado has taken place since the 1860s. In the past, Colorado called itself the Silver State.
Ralph Jackson Roberts (1911–2007) was an American geologist and research scientist with the USGS. He is credited with the discovery of the Carlin and Battle Mountain Gold Belts, which make up the richest gold-mining region in Nevada as well as the United States.
The Getchell Mine is an underground gold mine in the Potosi Mining District of Humboldt County, Nevada, on the east flank of the Osgood Mountains, 35 miles northeast of Winnemucca. Prospectors Edward Knight and Emmet Chase discovered gold in 1933 and located the first claims in 1934. With the financial backing of Noble Getchell and George Wingfield, the Getchell Mine, Inc. was organized in 1936 and the mine was brought into production in 1938.
Gold mining in Nevada, a state of the United States, is a major industry, and one of the largest sources of gold in the world. In 2018 Nevada produced 5,581,160 troy ounces, representing 78% of US gold and 5.0% of the world's production. Total gold production recorded from Nevada from 1835 to 2017 totals 205,931,000 troy ounces (6,405.2 t), worth US$322.6 billion at 2020 values. Much of Nevada's gold production comes from large open pit mining using heap leaching recovery.
John Sealy Livermore was an American geologist who discovered or helped to discover four major gold deposits in northern Nevada.
Franco-Nevada Corporation is a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based, gold-focused royalty and streaming company with a diversified portfolio of cash-flow producing assets. It is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange.
Carlin–type gold deposits are sediment-hosted disseminated gold deposits. These deposits are characterized by invisible gold in arsenic rich pyrite and arsenopyrite. This dissolved kind of gold is called "Invisible Gold", as it can only be found through chemical analysis. The deposit is named after the Carlin mine, the first large deposit of this type discovered in the Carlin Trend, Nevada.
Goldstrike is a gold mine in Eureka County in north-eastern Nevada. It is located on the Carlin Trend, a prolific gold mining district. It is owned and operated by Barrick Gold. Since Barrick acquired Goldstrike in 1986, until 2018 it produced 44.4 million ounces of gold.
The geology of Pakistan encompasses the varied landscapes that make up the land constituting modern-day Pakistan, which are a blend of its geological history, and its climate over the past few million years.
The geology of Myanmar is shaped by dramatic, ongoing tectonic processes controlled by shifting tectonic components as the Indian plate slides northwards and towards Southeast Asia. Myanmar spans across parts of three tectonic plates separated by north-trending faults. To the west, a highly oblique subduction zone separates the offshore Indian plate from the Burma microplate, which underlies most of the country. In the center-east of Myanmar, a right lateral strike slip fault extends from south to north across more than 1,000 km (620 mi). These tectonic zones are responsible for large earthquakes in the region. The India-Eurasia plate collision which initiated in the Eocene provides the last geological pieces of Myanmar, and thus Myanmar preserves a more extensive Cenozoic geological record as compared to records of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras. Myanmar is physiographically divided into three regions: the Indo-Burman Range, Myanmar Central Belt and the Shan Plateau; these all display an arcuate shape bulging westwards. The varying regional tectonic settings of Myanmar not only give rise to disparate regional features, but they also foster the formation of petroleum basins and a diverse mix of mineral resources.
The geology of Nevada began to form in the Proterozoic at the western margin of North America. Terranes accreted to the continent as a marine environment dominated the area through the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods. Intense volcanism, the horst and graben landscape of the Basin and Range Province originating from the Farallon Plate, and both glaciers and valley lakes have played important roles in the region throughout the past 66 million years.
