![]() ![]() So you've always got that in the back of your head, you know, "When do I leave, how long do I stay, have I stayed too long? I'm wasting time, I'm wasting money for my next patch." They follow these spots, called "nobbies," hoping to find more opal deeper in the rock.įrederick: You'll keep going in a straight line till the trace runs out, and then come back where there was trace in the wall, go left and right, and then if that stops, then you come back and do it again. ![]() Narrator: Miners search for areas in the rock with trace amounts of opal. ![]() Then they must clear out an underground room large enough to start digging at the rock.įrederick: The basic idea of mining is basically extract the opal clay out from the ground, put it onto a truck, I take the truck to a puddling site in town, and check if there's opal in that. ![]() Narrator: Miners start by drilling a vertical shaft in an area that they think contains opal. But even for experts, finding black opal isn't easy.įrederick: If you were to start mining tomorrow, and once you learn mining skills - and I've been mining for 40 years - we'd be an equal chance, just because there's nothing really that can tell you, "Oh, there is opal in that piece of ground" or "There's not opal in that piece of ground." Miners have been searching for opal here for over 100 years. It's located on the edge of the Outback, with a population of just over 2,000 people. And a lot of the black opal is found here, at Lightning Ridge. But over 90% of the world's opal comes from Australia. Narrator: Opal is found in several parts of the world, including Ethiopia, Brazil, and Mexico. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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