Gold Nuggety? (Nugus, and yes, Cleverley, and then some)

How to recognize gold that’s nuggety, amidst the rabble of planet earth? This study makes a suggestion:

“Using Geochemical Proxies to Model Nuggety Gold Deposits: An example from Sunrise Dam, Western Australia,” E. June Hill [pictured here], Nicholas H.S. Oliver, Louise Fisher, James S. Cleverley, Michael J. Nugus, Journal of Geochemical Exploration, epub May 24, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at CSIRO (Bentley, WA), James Cook University, and AngloGold Ashanti,  in Perth, Australia, report:

“Gold distribution in vein-hosted hydrothermal ore deposits is commonly nuggety (i.e. occurs as very localised concentrations of gold). In these cases samples for gold assay from diamond drill core may be too small to model the underlying heterogeneity of gold distribution and result in poorly constrained orebody models and underestimated gold resources…. We present a method for automating the use of geochemical proxies for nuggety gold ore bodies.”

Here’s another detail from the study: