Amateur prospector finds huge gold nugget in Australia worth more than R $ 800,000

An amateur prospector has found a huge gold nugget worth $160,000 in Australia.

Discovered in the state of Victoria, in an area known as the “Golden Triangle”, the gold-filled rock weighs 4.6 kilograms, with the precious metal making up 2.6 kilograms.

Named the “Lucky Strike Nugget”, the gold specimen was taken to the Lucky Strike Gold prospecting shop late last year and fell into the hands of the shop owner. Darren Kamp who evaluated it.

“When my hand reached out, my jaw dropped,” Kamp told CNN “It was just amazing. A once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”

Kamp has been in the gold prospecting business for 43 years and said he has “never seen a rock this size with that much gold.”

People often go to the store with a stone that looks like gold but isn’t, he added.

The man who found the stone initially only took half of it to be appraised and asked Kamp if there could be $6,675 worth of gold in it.

The rock was very dirty, so the observer, who doesn’t want to be identified, couldn’t see the gold on the outside, and he broke it in two because he thought there would be a gold nugget inside, Kamp said.

Once cleaned, “you could see the gold coming out of the rock everywhere,” he said.

“Worth looking for gold”

The miner used a Minelab Equinox 800 detector that cost $800, Kamp said.

“It just proves that a machine can find gold,” added Kamp, who said his store has sold more detectors recently, likely because interest rates are rising and people are looking for ways to supplement their income.

“It’s worth looking for,” Kamp said. “You only need two little pieces and you basically have $200 [australianos]”.

In 2020 prospectors in South Australia found two massive nuggets worth $250,000 (R$1.2 million) in historic gold fields.

In 2013, an amateur explorer discovered one worth at least $300,000.

The discovery of rich gold deposits in the Ballarat and Bendigo regions of Victoria in 1851 led to a series of gold rushes in Australia in the 1850s.

It was common for fortune hunters to find huge nuggets, the largest being the “Holtermann Nugget”, which weighed over 90 kilos.