Ethiopia could be sitting on one of world's great untapped gold deposits

phys.org ^ | January 24, 2018 | by Liam Bullock, The Conversation

[Red Badger]

To the west of Ethiopia near the Sudanese border lies a place called the Asosa zone. This may be the location of the oldest gold mine in the world. Dating back some 6,000 years, it provided a key source of gold to the ancient Egyptian empire, whose great wealth was famous throughout the known world. It may even have supplied the Queen of Sheba with her lavish gifts of gold when she visited King Solomon of Israel almost 3,000 years ago.

The excitement in this part of the world is more about the future, however. Some local inhabitants already make a living from prospecting, and several mining companies have been active in the area in recent years, too.

But what comes next could be on a much bigger scale: I have just co-published with my colleague, Owen Morgan, new geological research that suggests that much more treasure might be buried under the surface of this east African country than was previously thought.

Treasure trail

The Asosa zone is made up of flatlands, rugged valleys, mountainous ridges, streams and rivers. It is densely vegetated by bamboo and incense trees, with remnants of tropical rainforests along the river valleys. The zone, which is part of Ethiopia's Benishangul-Gumuz region, is spotted with archaeological sites containing clues to how people lived here thousands of years ago, together with ancient mining pits and trenches.

Local inhabitants have long taken advantage of these riches. They pan for gold in Asosa's streams and also extract the precious metal directly from outcropping rocks.

Local inhabitants panning for gold. Credit: Owen Morgan

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More substantial exploitation of the region's riches dates back to the Italian invasion of the 1930s. The Italians explored the Welega gold district in West Welega, south-east of Asosa.

Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, believed the country had the potential to become a global leader in gold. But when the revolutionary Derg government deposed him and the country plunged into civil war, gold mining disappeared off the agenda for a decade and a half. It took until the early 2000s before the government started awarding exploration licences.

Several mines are up and running, neither of them in Asosa. One is at Lega Dembi slightly to the east, owned by Saudi interests. The other, at Tigray in the north of the country, is owned by American mining giant Newmont, and just started production late last year.

More is already on the way: the beneficiary of the Italian efforts from the 1930s in Welega is the Tulu Kapi gold prospect, containing 48 tonnes of gold. This was most recently acquired in 2013 by Cyprus-based mining group KEFI Minerals (market value: roughly US$2.3 billion (£1.7 billion)).

As for Asosa, the Egyptian company ASCOM made a significant gold discovery in the zone in 2016. It published a maiden resource statement that claimed the presence of – curiously the same number – 48 tonnes of gold. Yet this only looks like the beginning.

View across the gold-bearing schist rocks of the Asosa zone, Benishangul-Gumuz. Credit: Owen Morgan

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Au-some potential?

The Asosa zone geology is characterised by various kinds of volcanic and sedimentary rocks that are more than 600 million-years-old. The region has been intensely deformed by geological forces, resulting in everything from kilometre-long faults to tiny cracks known as veins which are only centimetres in length.

Some of these veins contain quartz, and it is mainly here that the region's gold accumulated between 615m and 650m years ago – along with silver and various other minerals. The gold came from molten materials deep within the Earth finding their way upwards during a process known as subduction, where tectonic forces drive oceanic crust beneath a continent. This is comparable to the reasons behind gold deposits in island arcs like some of the ones in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Our field observations and panning suggest that gold should be generally abundant across the Asoza zone – both in quartz veins but also elsewhere in the schist and pegmatite rocks in which they are located. We also see signs of substantial graphite deposits, which are important for everything from touch-screen tablets to lithium-ion batteries.

There is undoubtedly much more world-class gold within this area than has already been discovered, pointing to a promising source of income for the government for years to come – much of the region remains unexplored, after all. It probably is no exaggeration to say that Ethiopia's gold potential could rival South Africa's, which would put it somewhere around the top five gold producing nations in the world.

There are still some substantial challenges, however. Dealing with governmental red tape can be difficult. In an area like the Asosa zone there are dangerous wildlife to avoid, such as venimous snakes, baboons and even monkeys. The vegetation also becomes forbiddingly wild during wet seasons.

It is also important to strike up good working relationships with local inhabitants, showing the utmost respect to local cultures – it's the ethical way to operate, and failing to do so can make life harder with the authorities in the capital. This includes the need to preserve the natural beauty of the region; gold mining already has a very bad international reputation for environmental damage.

With the right approach, however, western Ethiopia will be a literal gold mine that could bring economic benefit to the region. What the Queen of Sheba may have known 3,000 years ago, the modern world is finally rediscovering today.

Explore further: Scientists reveal the mystery about the origin of gold

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-ethiopia-world-great-untapped-gold.html#jCp

[gleeaikin]

In the US, oil companies that extract oil from privately owned land are paying the owners 12% royalties, I believe of the spot market per barrel price. Big oil didn’t get rich collecting 5-10% of the profits.

[muggs]

I would still like to see them get more than 12% but if that’s what they have to pay then so be it. It would be nice if whoever removes it hires some of the locals.

[SparkyBass]

"If there’s a way to screw it up, Todd Hoffman will find it!................"

LOL!!!

but rest assured he will "kick some ass" screwing it up and find a way to shift the blame to Parker Schnabel :D

[Larry Lucido]

[Red Badger]

My favorite episode!....................

[gleeaikin]

I learned about the 12% royalties for oil around 2000 when we were deciding whether to buy out my brother-in-law’s share of farm land in southern Illinois. As we drove around the countryside we saw a lot of the “grasshopper” type pumps along with a storage tank on people’s land. It seems the pump fills the storage tank and then someone comes by and empties the tank into a tank truck. Not much labor involved once the well is drilled. A lot of the rigs were pumping 4 to 20 barrels a day/week? I don’t remember now which. The farmers were not getting rich, but it was a nice, if small, steady income. We finally decided to sell, doing a Starker exchange for a piece of rural land much closer to home. The link below explains and shows some pumps in action. The ones I saw were mostly smaller than shown here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpjack

[commish]

And we know where Todd Hoffman is headed next!!! LOL

[gleeaikin]

While I really like Velikovsky and have read 3 or 4 of his books, many decades ago, his hypothesis of Thutmose III/Hatshepsut and Solomon is off by about 500 years. Thutmose III lived in the 1400s BCE and Solomon lived in the 900s BCE. In one of his books he wrote about the great masses of animal bones found in Canada (and perhaps Alaska) all tangled together. When I read the book by Firestone, et al (https://www.amazon.com/Cycle-Cosmic-Catastrophes-Stone-Age-Changed/dp/1591430615), this report by Velikovsky made perfect sense. This links below have detailed and fascinating information on the entire subject of cosmic earth strikes and the many who have contributed or argued about this still controversial and worrysome subject. The first link is the general detailed discussion with many references. The second link covers the Firestone, et al arguments.

http://atlantipedia.ie/samples/tag/richard-firestone/

http://atlantipedia.ie/samples/firestone-richard/

[SunkenCiv]

Thutmose III lived in the 1400s BCE and Solomon lived in the 900s BCE.

That was Dr. V's point -- the dating of much of the New Kingdom is off, padded by hundreds of years. Hatshepsut's voyage to Punt has been headed toward the exits, despite the documentation in bas relief (and recently, ropes used for Egyptian ships were found, piled in a cave on the Red Sea; they've been attributed to her voyages, but they haven't been RC dated AFAIK -- the still-influential Zahi Hawass claims that RC dating "doesn't work" in Egypt, a nutty belief probably based on the fact that RC dating of these very kinds of finds contradict the conventional pseudochronology). This growing denial of the Punt voyage is likely due to the fact that there is no candidate for Punt. It's interesting, because the port official who rec'd her and her expedition at Punt is named, and his name shows up again in just one place -- the Old Testament in Solomon's time. There is no such validation of the conventional dating.

[SunkenCiv]

My g-pa used to lease the oil rights in seven year intervals, a trickle of income that helped him make ends meet (this showed up in the abstract of title). Based on the geology, anyone living over the oil-bearing strata has to agree to drilling, even if the drilling isn’t on their own property.

[gleeaikin]

We received a letter from the local coal company asking us to sell them the mining rights to the underground coal for $1,000 an acre. After I call USGS and learned the coal was 800 feet down, we sold the rights and bought a rental income property which has increased 5 fold in value since the early 1980s. We probably would not have sold it if it would be strip mined.

[SunkenCiv]

So the company mined it using a shaft instead?

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

That’s where the “crank” part comes in. Velikovsky inserts 500 years into Egyptian chronology (he extends the Hyksos occupation by 500 years), which moves the Egyptian New Kingdom period to be contemporaneous with David and Solomon. This solves many issues with lack of synchrony between Egyptian and Israelite history. For instance, Thutmose III records his conquest of the Holy City (Kadesh) on his temple tomb walls at Karnak, including what appears to be the loot from Solomon’s Temple, which didn’t exist in 1400s. The only Jewish record that matches is that of Pharaoh Shishak’s conquest of Jerusalem and his looting of the Temple during the 5th year of King Rehoboam. Similarly, history records no “Queen of the South” that matches the Biblical Queen of Sheba other than Hatshepsut. So it kind of hangs together and makes sense, at least to this layman.

[gleeaikin]

Here is an interesting link on Tut III’s conquest at Megiddo (Armegeddon). http://www.pbs.org/empires/egypt/newkingdom/tuthmosis3.html

Here is chronology as recorded according to Biblical accounts. http://www.truthnet.org/Biblicalarcheology/6/conquestcanaan.htm