I hope everyone will find this as interesting as I do.

How much gold is there in the world yet undiscovered, well after doing a little math using some numbers from wikipedia which says the earth's crust contains .0031ppm I've come up with 74 billion tonnes of gold in the earth's crust. I've estimated how much gold there is on land by using an average crust depth of 40km for land and 29% of the surface area as compared to 8km and 71% for the oceans.

This results in an average of all most 12M oz per sq km of surface area or in the case of Tesoro chance 1 (4km x 2.5km) of 120M oz. This is a world average, unfortunately most of that gold is usually unobtainable, likely 30-50km deep in the earths crust.

Now interestingly most gold is made accessable to us by a process known as orogeny as discribed below.

Orogeny refers to forces and events leading to a severe structural deformation of the Earth's crust due to the engagement of tectonic plates. Response to such engagement results in the formation of long tracts of highly deformed rock called orogens or orogenic belts. The word "orogeny" comes from the Greek (oros for "mountain" plus genesis for "creation" or "origin"), and it is the primary mechanism by which mountains are built on continents. Orogens develop while a continental plate is crumpled and thickened to form mountain ranges, and involve a great range of geological processes collectively called orogenesis

Plate tectonics is the underlying mechanism for generating gold deposits. The majority of primary gold deposits fall into two main categories: lode gold deposits or intrusion-related deposits.

Lode gold deposits are generally high-grade, thin, vein and fault hosted. They are primarily made up of quartz veins also known as lodes or reefs, which contain either native gold or gold sulfides and tellurides. Lode gold deposits are usually hosted in basalt or in sediments known as turbidite, although when in faults, they may occupy intrusive igneous rocks such as granite.

Lode-gold deposits are intimately associated with orogeny and other plate collision events within geologic history. Most lode gold deposits sourced from metamorphic rocks because it is thought that the majority are formed by dehydration of basalt during metamorphism. The gold is transported up faults by hydrothermal waters and deposited when the water cools too much to retain gold in solution.

Everyone likely knows a little bit about plate tectonics, but I was surprised when I had a look at a map showing the plates and the only place in the world where an ocean plate was subducting directly under the edge of a continent was on the west coast of Latin America and South America. It has probably happened quite often prior to the breakup of the Pangea supercontinent, but for the past 250M years this has been likely happening the most along the west coast of South America.

I also found it interesting that while the earth's crust can be very old on land, upto 4B+ years, the ocean floors are no older than 170M years. The ocean crust is being created in trenches in the middle of the ocean and is being consumed by subduction under other plates.

This is a google earth image of Peru with the location of Tesoro.

It's like this all along the west cost of South America, you can clearly see the subduction of the Nazca plate under South America. All along the coast the water plunges to a depth of about 3,000m.

Now I suspect that those average 120M oz of gold deep below Chance 1 along with a few more that have been accumulating from the ocean floor have been purcolating their way to the surface for millions of years and are ready for us to find.

To illustrate just how big the Tesoro ovoid is I've selected a few more images to put it into perspective.

You are looking at the 2nd largest manmade hole in the world – the Mir Mine. This large excavated hole is located in Myrny in Siberia, Russia and is also called Mirny Mine. This open pit diamond mine is 525 meters deep with a diameter of 1,200 meters

Above is a google earth view of SLI's Tesoro with the claim bounderies overlaid.

Below is the Mirny Mir Mine overlaid onto the chance 1 ovoid.

Keep in mind that the Mir Mine only went down 525M, which is near the center of the ovoid, the Tesoro pit will need to go down at least twice as deep and therefore willl be at least 4 times the size at the surface.

The Kalgoorlie "Super Pit" gold mine in Western Australia (jointly operated by Barrick & Newmont) will eventually be 3.8km X 1.35km. Chance 1 is 4km X 2.5km.

The other large gold mining operations I've looked at in Peru do not appear to have gone any deeper than 300M.

As Sculpin has alluded, the acquistioner will probably need some more elbow room in order to mine the Tesoro property.

BubaBob