The word overburden in mining operations is used to describe the waste, horizon of the soil, or surface of the soil of the alluvial gold mine.
Put simply, is the layer of the soil that does not contain (AU) gold-bearing materials. Usually, this layer of the soil that contains gold particles is mixed with clay, sand, and gravel, and by the time you wash away the sand, clay, and gravel what you find left is the gold particles with few impurities. The soil when digging to the layer where you will find gold often consists of iron which is mostly red in color, this is a good lead soil to AU deposits.
Local alluvial gold miners too sometimes have what they called HOT SPOT in an alluvial gold mine, this is a location of the mine where in just a diameter of less than 1 meter or so they would mine huge deposits of alluvial gold up to 30 kg or more of gold. In galamsey mining operation, they also call it the Jackpot.
These locals sometimes even figure from the soil contents whether there will be a good deposit of gold or not and like we mentioned in the previous article even with the color and the kind of gravel deposited they can also tell. There is various kind of fraudulent activities when buying gold or investing in galamsey mining operations this will be discussed in the next Article.
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