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Exploring - The "Honey Hole" Faults >

Particular Faults Lead To Gold

Small Fault Systems Most Often Lead To Gold

However, Not All Cracks in the Earth Are Faults

Introduction: The following is a portion of the information gathered about faults.

Over the years while prospecting and working with the exploration programs, we have located an endless count of veins, lenses, and stringers.
In addition, with an endless count of faults, fractures, and seams on our properties, we have realized through research these faults do lead to gold and this has spiked our interest in faults.

Small-scale fault systems in the earth's crust have a strong correlation with the location of gold, a recent study of the St. Ives Goldfields in Western Australia has found.
The research, published in the science journal Ore Geology Reviews, found that all major gold deposits are controlled by faults, but small fault systems are more likely to lead to gold than larger ones.
Determining the spatial relationship between geological features such as fault lines, and gold traces, is not only important to understand how deposits form, but it can also guide mineral exploration because the information can be used to develop predictive mineral maps.
A fault is a surface or narrow zone along which one side has moved relative to the other in a direction parallel to the surface or zone. Most faults are brittle shear fractures or zones of closely spaced shear fractures, but some are narrow shear zones of ductile deformation where the movement took place without loss of cohesion at the outcrop scale.

Types of Faults

A fault divides the rocks it cuts into two fault blocks.

For an incline fault: these are as referred to as a hanging wall for the bottom surface of the upper fault block and foot-wall for the top surface of the lower fault block. In a tunnel, these are the surfaces that literally hang overhead or lie underfoot. The fault block above the fault is the hanging wall block, and the block below the fault is the foot-wall block. For a vertical fault, of course, these distinctions do not apply, and the sides of the fault are named in accordance with geographic directions: the northwest side and the southwest side, for instance.

Faults are also divided into three categories depending on the orientation of the relative displacement or slip, which is the net distance and direction that the hanging block has moved with respect to the foot-wall block. On dip and slip faults, the slip is approximately parallel to the dip of the fault surface, on strike-slip faults, the slip is approximately horizontal, parallel to the strike of the fault surface.