الوصف

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. Nuggets are also found in the tailings piles of previous mining operations, especially those left by gold mining dredges.

Nuggets are usually *1K to *3K purity (*2% to *6%). Gold nuggets in Congo often are *3K or slightly higher,  Purity can be roughly assessed by the nugget color, the richer and deeper the orange-yellow the higher the gold content. Nuggets are also referred to by their fineness, for example "**5 fine" means the nugget is **5 parts per thousand in gold.