A gold nugget weighing 64.8 grams has been located in the Shropshire Hills, England. This is the biggest find of its kind in the UK, but the story behind the discovery is impressive. Richard Brock unearthed the material using faulty equipment.
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The UK’s largest gold nugget
The gold nugget has an estimated value of around US$38,000, almost R$190,000. It was found during an expedition organized in May last year by a group of hunters for precious materials.
What makes the discovery more impressive is that Richard Brock was late for the event. He says he traveled three and a half hours to participate in the search, but arrived more than an hour late and was sure he had missed any opportunity.
Furthermore, he realized that his detection kit was not working. Therefore, she had to resort to an older and defective machine.
Despite this, it only took a few minutes for him to make the event’s great discovery, which was nicknamed “Hiro’s Nugget”.
Everyone there had all this updated kit and I arrived with three old machines, and one of them didn’t work. It just goes to show that no matter what equipment you use, if you’re walking over the find and are alert enough to what might be hiding beneath the ground, it makes all the difference.
Richard Brock
The largest gold nugget found on British soil so far weighed 54 grams, according to The Guardian. The information is from ScienceAlert.
The search for precious metals
- Amateur hunters have been active for decades, driven by the hope of finding valuable treasures or historical artifacts.
- In 1989, for example, a man searched the Sonoran Desert, on the border between Mexico and the United States, in an area that supposedly contained gold.
- One day he unearthed what became known as the “Boot of Cortez,” the largest gold nugget ever found in the Western Hemisphere.
- In the shape of a boot, it weighed more than 26 kilograms of solid gold.
- The development of technology has further fueled this interest, with metal detectors and other devices becoming more sophisticated, as well as GPS-assisted applications for tracking routes and marking discoveries.
- The most expensive metal detector can cost US$15,000 (around R$75,000), but the most basic models can be found for a few hundred dollars.
