The Geology of Gulag Gold

Gold mining prisoners in the Kolyma Basin.  They are mining placer gold that is found throughout the area.

The Gulag Ore Field or more correctly the Ducat gold/silver deposit that is located in the central part of the Balygychan-Sugoi trough that is a graben shaped depression that is located near the town of Omsukchan, Kolyma that adjoins to its north the Okhotsk – Chukota a marginal continental volcanic belt.

The deposits of gold are centered on a Cretaceous (ca. 120 million year old) volcanic dome consisting of ultra-potassic rhyolites, ignimbrites and tuff that are interlayered with black argillites.  The whole volcanic complex is intruded at depth by a late Cretaceous (ca. 85 million year old) granite that is from 1,200 – 1,300 meters below the surface.

More gold miners at work in the Kolyma Basin

There were pulses of igneous activity that caused hydrothermal activity to occur in the dome that involved large quantities of fractured, porous and highly permeable Cretaceous rhyolite sills and other steeply dipping subvolcanic bodies to be affected covering an area that covered more then 25 square kilometers.

Most of the known mineralization was later to the younger intrusion that includes tin bearing greisen-type that occurs in the contact zones of the granitic plutons. They ore deposits himself were located at a considerable distance from the granite.

Part of the Kolyma Basin is within the Arctic Circle giving it a sub-Arctic climate having very cold winters that can last for up to six months. Most of the area is covered with permafrost and tundra. During the winter temperatures range from -19°C to -38°C with even lower temperatures found in the interior. Besides gold there are also rich reserves of silver, 10, tungsten, mercury, antimony, coal, oil and peat. It has been estimated that the area contains in addition to gold 1.2 billion tons of oil and one point 5,000,000,000 m³ of gas.

This is the area whose mineral wealth was discovered by Yuri Bilibin in the 1920s that was quickly developed into the infamous Gulag prison camps by Stalin in the 1930s. There was also the area Bilibin used as the model for his theory of Metallogeny and Global Tectonics that has gained much traction sense of the world of geology.

Development began in 1932 and of Joseph Stalin the Kolyma Basin became the most notorious place for the Gulag labor camps. It has been estimated that over 1 million people died en route to the area or in the Kolyma’s between from 1932 until 1954. It was Kolyma’s reputation that caused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ferrite his famous book the Gulag Archipelago. In this book Solzhenitsyn came to characterize it as the “pole cold and cruelty.”

Gold and platinum were found in the Kolyma during the time when industrialization began in the USSR under Stalin’s First Five Year Plan in a period when the need for capital that would finance this economic development.  The Kolyma Basin gold was a perfect fit and development of the basin began in 1932 based on prisoner labor. 

In 1932 construction began on Kolyma Highway into the interior those that become known as the Road of Bones because of the number of people in Paris in its construction. This role eventually came to serve 80 different camps that were not have around the region of the uninhabited taiga. The first director of the Kolyma camps was Eduard Berzin who was the Cheka officer that was removed in 1937 and shot during the period of great purges of the USSR.

Far Eastern Russia geologically is North American plate that also includes Kamchatka Peninsula in northern Hokkaido Island of Japan. This being so it is probable that the gold deposits of this part of Siberia are closely related to those found in the Tintina gold belt of Alaska. It also indicates that most landmasses on Earth are really just one supercontinent with the sole exception being Antarctica.

How to sample a lode gold deposit

_Pieces of drill cores
Photo by Constantino Figini 

Once you have discovered a promising outcrop of lode gold the next step is to sample the deposit.  This can be done in several different ways, but sometimes the old tried and true methods are the best.  The simplest way is to chisel a channel right across the outcrop of ore in which you are interested.  This is a lot of hard work but is well worth the effort.  The chiseling is done with a one inch (25 mm) stone chisel and a four pound hammer (2 kg), a short handled striking hammer works best for this.  The chips are saved in a cloth sample bag for later assaying.

Another situation you may come across is several outcrops of potential ore around your site that is in this case too much to sample the outcrops singly in a first sampling program on the site.  In this case you can go around the site and simply chip off a small sample from each outcrop, then have it assayed.  This isn’t the best method for sampling channeling is, but at least it will give some idea of what you have discovered.  Be sure you keep the samples random, and don’t favor what looks like hi-grade ore because this will skew the results of your sampling.

If you want to be sure about the accuracy of your samples send them to three different assayers then average the readings so you will come up with an average reading instead of a single assay.  This has been found to be more accurate.

After the preliminary sampling has been done, and your site has been proved to hold gold it is time to go onto more sampling to find out how much gold your site really holds, and if it is large enough to develop a mine.  It can take a lot of money to develop a hard rock gold mine, sometimes more then a billion dollars.  You should also keep in mind that only about one in a hundred gold discoveries are eventually developed into a paying gold mine.  They call it lode gold because it takes a load of money to develop it into a mine.

Drilling the orebody is the accepted method of proving the size of a gold deposit that is commercially viable.  This is done using a diamond core drill that gives you a solid core sample to examine.  Core drilling rigs come in several sizes with the smallest ones a drilling rig that can be back-packed.  There are several companies that make these drills that are capable of going at least 15 meters into solid rock.  Even larger rigs are available capable of drilling more then 1,200 feet into bedrock.

A back-pack rig is within the scope of something a prospector can carry into the bush with him, but larger rigs are best handled by specialized drilling companies.  The samples these take are cylinders or stone bearing the ore.  The first thing that happens when a core is retrieved is to split it in half lengthwise so the prospector retains half of the core with the remainder being shipped off to an assayer.  A series of core drill cores are used to delimit the actual size of an orebody by moving the drill rig further to the initial hole until the last hole bored is beyond the last hole bearing payable ore.  Many of these drilling programs encompass drilling kilometers of core drill holes.

Gold Mines of the Future

An underground waterfalls inside a gold mine.  Crusier

Future gold mines and mines in general haven’t changed much except incrementally in more then a century, a situation that has to change as mines keep getting deeper and hotter.  Theoretically it is possible to reach depths of 33,000 feet using existing technology, but at these depths human miners are not able to work efficiently calling for other technologies not depending on man.  There have been many advances in the scienceof robotics that may fill some of these needs, but other technologies are going to be needed too.  The engineering department of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario is one of many organizations working on the problem of developing the Future Mine work is progressing at both the university level and in the R&D labs of mining companies.

One of the first things to vanish from mines in the future is the headframe that has been a hallmark of underground mines for centuries.  The mine hoist will no longer be needed as in most mines the hoist and cables will be replaced with a Maglevsystem similar to that used today on Maglev railroads.  There is no reason why the Maglev system won’t work vertically as well as horizontally.

Explosives that have been used in mines since the 17^th Century are another thing that is apt to be replaced by a system developed by Noranda Mines that makes use of high energy electricity that is stored in powerful condensers where the power is channeled into a drill hole filled with water that is ionized by having the electrical charge funneled into a thin copper wire between to steel rods.  The resulting explosion caused by the ionized water is extremely powerful capable of pulverizing rock, and is far safer to use then conventional explosives.

The Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) has already been successfully used for boring many tunnels throughout the world, one place where it has been used is in New York City where it has cut the tunnels for the New York Water Tunnel #3 that is 28 feet in diameter and many miles long.  Variations of this system can be used to replace the system of drill and shoot that is presently used.  The use of the TBM allows very small suzes some as small as a beer can used to follow small veins in the rock that are overlooked during today’s mining techniques.

One thing that is certain as man goes further into the Crust of the Earth in his quest for minerals man himself is apt to be left behind replaced by robots.  Human miners will become redundant.  One visionary even sees robots the size of ants being used in future mines that would spat a bacteria charged solution onto ore bearing rock that would dissolve the metals that then would be recovered from the resulting solution.  Things they are achanging!

The Difference between an Ore Deposit and a Mineral Deposit

A mineral deposit is the showing of any type of mineral whether it has value or is just of scientific interest. An ore deposit is a mineral deposit that has an economic value as well as a scientific value.

The copper mineral malachite
Photo by Rob Lavinsky

There are times when you can actually have a very large mineral deposit worth millions of dollars, but because of its location or the cost of production to mineral deposit is not classified as ore. A good example of this is a group of prospectors found a copper deposit in northern Canada that after performing a considerable amount of drilling it was determined that this copper deposit held $100 million worth of copper. Because of its isolated location and the amount of money that would've been required to bring this into production was actually more than the deposit was worth.

This example drives home the difference between ore deposits and mineral deposits to the extent that the prospectors of all eventually called this the $100,000,000. nuisance.