Gold nuggets on display on April 29, 2011 in Jamestown, California. Solid gold can be deposited in Earth's crust "almost instantaneously" during earthquakes, said a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday.
Posted on 03/18/2013 12:52:39 PM PDT by Red Badger
Solid gold can be deposited in Earth's crust "almost instantaneously" during earthquakes, said a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday.
The gold is formed when a tremor splits open a fluid-filled cavity in the Earth's crust, causing a sudden drop in pressure, according to a team of Australian researchers. This, in turn, causes the fluid to expand rapidly and evaporate, and any gold particles that had been dissolved in it to "precipitate almost immediately", said a Nature press release. "Repeated earthquakes could therefore lead to the build up of economic-grade gold deposits." The researchers said much of the world's known gold was derived from quartz veins that were formed during geological periods of mountain building as long as three billion years ago.
The veins formed during earthquakes, but the magnitude of pressure fluctuations or how they drove gold mineralisation were not known. For this study, researchers used a numerical model to simulate the drop in pressure experienced in a fluid-filled fault cavity during an earthquake. In so doing, they answered a long-standing question about the world's gold resources—how the metal becomes so concentrated from a highly dissolved state to a solid, mineable one.
The study said single tremors would not generate economically viable gold deposits, which were built up one thin coating at a time. To form a 100 tonne gold vein deposit would take less than 100,000 years, the team wrote.
More information: Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1759
Journal reference: Nature Geoscience
Gold nuggets on display on April 29, 2011 in Jamestown, California. Solid gold can be deposited in Earth's crust "almost instantaneously" during earthquakes, said a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday.
It’s funny how gold nuggets resemble chewed pieces of wax. :)
Ok, but what does this have to do with global warming?
As far as I can tell, all “science” is done with an eye toward global warming, in an effort to increase funding.
Thanks for posting.
Just WOW!
Gold causes people to get wealthy and buy stuff so it makes global warming........
“Gold causes people to get wealthy and buy stuff so it makes global warming........”
I see. So this is a crisis and we need to figure out how to stop it? Or, at least figure out how to vaporize any newly created gold?
Well, if we’re ALL poor, then we can’t buy stuff, so no more global warming............
I wonder how much gold was released from the Mt. St. Helens eruption. Sure would like to do a little sluicing in that neighborhood...
Since that dredge goes deeper than the guys with the hoses, he could clean out the claims that they are finished with........
One theory is that the heavier elements sank into the core of the liquid formation of the proto-earth, during the heavy bombardment era. As the earth fractures from the mantle shifting, the gold floats above the heavier elements and oozes out to fill the veins formed by earthquakes over eons. The original gold itself was formed in the nova explosion of a star.....
Look at the REAL dredge in the background...now THAT is a real money maker.
Wait a minute. Gold can be made by pressure. Coal can be made by pressure. I wonder who will be saying the Earth is only 100,000 years old and the rocks are 700million years old.
Gold is made in the death of a star’s nuclear furnace. It ‘falls’ into the gravity well of another star, where it eventually is accreted into one of its planets........
The article reads like some physicist down in the basement with a pocket protector who has never actually looked at a rock, let alone a thin section under crossed polars, thinks he just discovered the phenomenon of hydrothermal ore emplacement, and its connection to structural geology, seismic activity, chemical complexation, thermodynamics, and reaction rate kinetics.
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