A gold nugget is a naturally occurring piece of native gold. Watercourses often concentrate nuggets and finer gold in placers. Nuggets are recovered by placer mining, but they are also found in residual deposits where the gold-bearing veins or lodes are weathered. If we’ve learned one thing lately, it’s that we need to get into metal-detecting.
An unidentified prospector was out metal detecting near the city of Ballarat in Victoria in Australia known for gold mining when he picked up a signal. Under 23 inches of dirt, he found something incredible: a gold nugget. But not just any ordinary nugget.
At first, the prospector said, he thought he had found an ounce of gold. But as he kept digging and kept cleaning off the dirt, the nugget turned out to be 11-pounds. It’s valued at around $300,000 dollars at the time of this video.
Opinions have been expressed that it could be sold for much more due to its rarity. The Victoria, Australia gold rush of the early 1850s produced a number of large nuggets. But it is believed that Australia’s gold mines were mined to the point of exhaustion. However, the unidentified prospector’s discovery of the 11-pound gold nugget has led to the questioning of that belief.
The amateur prospector that found the gold nugget plans to use the money that he gets from selling it to pay off his house as well as other things that he now has the money to do. What would you do if you found an 11-pound gold nugget? Would you sell it or keep it? I honestly don’t know what I would do.
