Piece of wood containing traces of gold

About This Material

Wood recovered from inside an eight-foot-high void at a depth of 90 feet in Borehole DN11.5, drilled by Choice Drilling during Season 10 of The Curse of Oak Island. Surveyor Steve Guptill marked the location based on water testing that had identified the Baby Blob, a zone immediately west of the Garden Shaft, as carrying the highest concentrations of dissolved gold anywhere on the island. The team was targeting a suspected tunnel at 95 feet. The drill returned solid core at 78 feet and broke through into open space at 90, five feet shallower than expected. Terry Deveau examined the cores and identified the void as the top of an east-west tunnel running just beneath the Garden Shaft and previously intercepted in two other boreholes. The next core contained wood, which Dr. Ian Spooner sealed for testing. Marty Lagina ordered the Inuktun Spectrum 120 camera lowered into the borehole to image the chamber, but the screen went completely black inside the void.

At the Interpretive Center, archaeologist Laird Niven and Emma Culligan reported the laboratory results to Rick Lagina and Craig Tester. After drying the sample and running X-ray fluorescence analysis, Emma Culligan found the expected natural elements along with gold. Rick told Craig to call Marty immediately, framing the result as an evidence trail of comparable weight to the water samples that had defined the Baby Blob in the first place.

Subsequent episodes positioned the find within a broader pattern. In Season 10, Episode 20 Scott Barlow noted that DN11.5 and two other boreholes had returned wood at 95 feet, indicating a tunnel running through the Baby Blob toward the Garden Shaft's north corner, and that the tunnel tested positive for gold. In Season 10, Episode 21 Scott Barlow listed gold in three independent contexts: the water samples, the wood from the Garden Shaft itself, and the wood from Borehole DN11.5. In Season 11, Episode 1 the team returned with Borehole DN12, positioned less than three feet from the original DN11.5 strike, and recovered further wood from the same eight-foot-high chamber, confirming the previous year's result and extending the tunnel intercept to a fourth borehole.

Dating: Tunnel wood from a void at 90 feet; carbon dating of wood from nearby Borehole K15.5 in the same tunnel returned 48.1% probability of 1731-1806 and 35.5% probability of 1640-1687