Reporting on Mineweb today, comes this news that if true, will continue to feed the ongoing melt up in gold...

The apparent bottom line in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science is that South Africa's gold industry is on final deathwatch, despite claims of massive existing below-ground reserves. Chris Hartnady, research and technical director of Cape Town earth sciences consultancy Umvoto Africa, has found that South Africa's Witwatersrand goldfields are around 95% exhausted, and anticipates that production rates should fall permanently below 100 tonnes a year within the coming decade.

Gold production from the Witwatersrand, the biggest known gold field in the world, peaked at around 1,000 tonnes in 1970 and has declined ever since. Hartnady says that while initially (1970-1975) the decline was "quite precipitous", it has been interrupted by only short periods of slight trend reversal (1982-1984 and 1992-1993).

The biggest problem is that gold investors don't realize just how difficult it is to find and extract this precious metal.  Easy credit and expansive government policies have encouraged consumption of nearly everything on the planet on a scale that is unprecedented in history.  It's clear we are starting to run out of things and gold will be in great demand as fiat (paper) currencies continue to devalue vs. gold.