Gold and quartz from the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA. (SDSMT 5080, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Museum of Geology, Rapid City, South Dakota, USA)

A mineral is a naturally-occurring, solid, inorganic, crystalline substrance having a fairly definite chemical composition and having fairly definite physical properties. At its simplest, a mineral is a naturally-occurring solid chemical. Currently, there are over 4900 named and described minerals - about 200 of them are common and about 20 of them are very common. Mineral classification is based on anion chemistry. Major categories of minerals are: elements, sulfides, oxides, halides, carbonates, sulfates, phosphates, and silicates.

Elements are fundamental substances of matter - matter that is composed of the same types of atoms. At present, 118 elements are known (four of them are still unnamed). Of these, 98 occur naturally on Earth (hydrogen to californium). Most of these occur in rocks & minerals, although some occur in very small, trace amounts. Only some elements occur in their native elemental state as minerals.

To find a native element in nature, it must be relatively non-reactive and there must be some concentration process. Metallic, semimetallic (metalloid), and nonmetallic elements are known in their native state as minerals.

Gold (Au) is the most prestigious metal known, but it's not the most valuable. Gold is the only metal that has a deep, rich, metallic yellow color. Almost all other metals are silvery-colored. Gold is very rare in crustal rocks - it averages about 5 ppb (parts per billion). Where gold has been concentrated, it occurs as wires, dendritic crystals, twisted sheets, octahedral crystals, and variably-shaped nuggets. It most commonly occurs in hydrothermal quartz veins, disseminated in some contact- & hydrothermal-metamorphic rocks, and in placer deposits. Placers are concentrations of heavy minerals in stream gravels or in cracks on bedrock-floored streams. Gold has a high specific gravity (about 19), so it easily accumulates in placer deposits. Its high density allows prospectors to readily collect placer gold by panning.

In addition to its high density, gold has a high melting point (over 1000º C). Gold is also relatively soft - about 2.5 to 3 on the Mohs Hardness Scale. The use of pure gold or high-purity gold in jewelry is not desirable as it easily gets scratched. The addition of other metals to gold to increase the hardness also alters the unique color of gold. Gold jewelry made & sold in America doesn’t have the gorgeous rich color of high-purity gold.

The largest gold mine in the Americas was the long-lived Homestake Mine in the town of Lead (pronounced “Leed”), South Dakota, USA. Located in the Lead Window of the northern Black Hills Uplift in western South Dakota, the Homestake Mine produced about 40 million ounces of gold. The gold at Homestake is almost exclusively confined to the Homestake Formation, a Paleoproterozoic (~1.9-2.0 billion years) sedimentary unit that originally consisted of interbedded Mg-rich siderite iron formation and marlstones.

The Homestake Formation has been strongly deformed & multiply metamorphosed, and many of the original rocks were converted to greenschists (cummingtonite schists). The gold has been interpreted as having been originally deposited with the iron formation sediments by seafloor volcanogenic exahalative processes. Slight metamorphic gold mobilization and tight structural folding has resulted in the formation of auriferous greenschist pods along fold axes.