A 12-pound gold nugget was found by a very lucky amateur prospector in Australia as per reports from WebProNews on Jan. 17. As it turns out, the mystery prospector took to Victoria’s Fields in Ballarat, Australia to enjoy his hobby of mining and prospecting.
As he was checking out the area using his rather expensive equipment, a fancy $6,000 Minelab GPX 5000 metal detector, the unidentified amateur prosecutor noticed a strong reading from the ground.
The prospector found a 12 pound (177 ounces) gold nugget, priced $300,000 at market value. An International Business Times article explains the nugget will be sold as is when the prospector deems fit. Rather than melting it down for use as smaller parts, he has decided to sell the huge gold nugget as a single piece.
The prospector has since left the 12 pound nugget is in the care of the The Mining Exchange Gold Shop in Ballarat, Australia. The shop owner, an experienced prospector himself, comments:
"A lot of people think Victoria’s goldfields are dead and that there’s none left, but he (the prospector) has worked in an area where a lot of people have worked in the past but he persisted and he’s been rewarded. We are 162 years into the gold rush and it’s never totally waned, it’s just changed,"
“A finding like this gives people hope. It's my dream to find something like that, and I've been prospecting for more than two decades,”
You don’t hear of many people making such prosperous findings when setting out to use their swanky new metal detector. For one amateur prospector, it seems to have turned out to be quite the lucky day for him in Australia’s Victoria’s Fields.
Sources: WebProNews, International Business Times
His 12 pound gold nuggets had, at the very least, bought him his 15 minutes of fame, unidentified or not.
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