Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

Gold Grows Under Shrubs?

Some of Nova Scotia’s early gold miners apparently thought gold grew under shrubs!

J. P. Messervey, inspector at Nova Scotia’s Department of Mines, gave a speech to the Kiwanis Club in 1929. He said, according to the April 9 edition of the Evening Mail, that when gold was first discovered in Nova Scotia in 1858, “it was thought to grow under a certain kind of shrub, this shrub being nearly exterminated at the time by miners seeking the precious metal at its roots.”

We could find no additional details or confirmation of this in any other record, so it is likely that Messervey was exaggerating. However, it also seems unlikely that a scientist and senior government official like Messervey – he later served as deputy minister of the Department of Mines for many years – would just fabricate this story. So, perhaps at least a small number of early gold miners believed this curious explanation for how gold deposits form.

Many of the province’s first gold miners had no actual expertise in mining or geology. They were often farmers, tradesmen and men drawn from any number of other professions because the only skill required was the ability to swing a hammer to smash rock. In the 1860s, perhaps it did not seem far fetched to some of them that gold grew under a particular shrub, especially if someone had coincidentally found gold under one of those plants.

Modern gold mining is a sophisticated, science-based activity that takes excellent care of the environment. It creates high-paying jobs and provides a material we all use every day. For example, it is in all electronics, so it is in the device you are reading this on.

Modern gold mines can often fix environmental mistakes made by the unsophisticated miners of past generations by, for example, remediating historical tailings. The modern Moose River gold mine remediated two historical mine sites and 61,000 tonnes of contaminated soil from historical operations by digging them up and moving them into the modern mine’s tailings facility, where they can no longer interact with the environment.

To set the record straight, here is how most of Nova Scotia’s gold deposits formed:

All gold on Earth formed billions of years ago in stars that over-heated and blew up. Gold formed in the heat of the explosions and then floated around space. As rock, dust and other materials came together to form Earth, gold was distributed around the planet.

Most of Nova Scotia’s gold deposits started forming 400 million years ago when North Africa and North America started colliding. Layers of horizontal sedimentary rock were crumpled into anticlines (domes) and synclines (troughs) - a series of rock waves.

Fluid leached gold from rock deep underground and flowed into cracks in rock closer to surface, forming veins of gold-bearing quartz as the fluid eventually cooled and hardened. Anticline domes trapped the melted, gold-bearing rock as it rose from deep in earth's crust.

Gold is everywhere but to mine it, we need a geological anomaly like a tectonic plate collision to form a deposit - to concentrate the gold so a mine is economically viable.