gold fields
Where nuggets await
Gold fields are areas where gold has been discovered and is being actively mined or prospected.
The term evokes the 19th-century gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa, when fortune seekers flooded remote regions hoping to strike it rich.
Today it appears in historical contexts and place names, as well as occasionally describing modern mining operations.
Prospectors swarmed the gold fields of the Yukon.
- pay dirtValuable ore deposit
- strike it richSuddenly acquire great wealth
- prospectorsMineral deposit searchers
- boomtownsFast-growing frontier settlements
- fault zonesAreas of crustal breakage
deforestation · dredging · mining camps · ghost towns · soil erosion · forty-niners · mercury pollution · water contamination · volcanic belts · underground mining · open pit mine · habitat destruction · commodity markets · motherlode · biodiversity loss · Klondike · environmental regulations · nuggets
- Gold Rushprospectors, sluice, forty-niners, Sutter's Mill, pan
- Colonial AustraliaBotany Bay, penal colonies, convicts, penal colony, colonial settlement
- New Zealand HistoryTreaty of Waitangi, Maori, colonists, settlers, colonial period
- Southern AfricaZulu, Kruger National Park, Angola, Shona, Zambia