The Curse of Oak Island is back tonight with Episode 16 of Season 9, and the team has found even more gold as they continue the ‘big dig’ in the Money Pit area.
The show is returning after its mid-season break last week, and we can expect the Oak Island team to start back exactly where they left off. That is, using ten-foot-wide steel caissons to excavate the Money Pit and finally find the treasure.
And while they may not uncover a vast horde of treasure on tonight’s show, they do find some more gold.
At the start of this season, the Oak Island team invested in an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) machine, which has allowed them to analyze the chemical composition of artifacts. It’s already proved to be massively useful in detecting trace amounts of gold and silver in various objects, and it seems we can expect more of the same tonight.
Marty Lagina celebrates another gold artifact
A preview features Marty Lagina and a couple of the guys at the archaeology trailer, where they’ve fed a piece of metal into the XRF machine. The results look good as they show the presence of Au, which is the chemical symbol for gold. Marty’s very happy, “that’s gold… just amazing,” he says, with a big grin on his face.
It’s unclear where this artifact comes from, but in the same preview, metal detectorist Gary Drayton uncovered an object while searching the spoils from the Money Pit.
However, the History Channel’s episode descriptor points to the discovery possibly being made elsewhere, it reads:
“An incredible discovery is made near the swamp as Rick, Marty, and the team continue digging in the Money Pit in search of the fabled treasure vault, following a path first forged by former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
If the Oak Island team has discovered gold outside of the Money Pit area, that would be one hell of a revelation and would mean they’d need to greatly increase their area of operations. However, expanding the search area would invariably lead to complications with the Nova Scotian government, as happened earlier in the season when a large area of the swamp was deemed off-limits to the team.
Oak Island team runs into problems at the Money Pit
Meanwhile, there’s another problem at the Money Pit. A couple of weeks ago, the giant grab hammer struggled to pull out earth when it came across a large boulder; however, it soon managed to pull the thing out. Now though, it’s hit something even bigger; Vanessa Lucido says, “the hammer grab is grabbing onto something that is too heavy to pull out.”
It’s most likely a large rock, but some of the guys will be hoping it’s a treasure vault. Whatever is causing the blockage will be huge as the hammer grab can pull out a whopping 11,000 lbs of earth.
There were always going to be problems, and the operation was never going to run entirely smoothly, so let’s hope the guys can iron out the issue as soon as possible.
The Curse of Oak Island airs at 9/8c on History.
I’m so bored after 3-4 years of iron nails and pieces of wood. Instead of that expensive equipment putting holes in the ground, they need to go old school and actually dig a shaft.