Bold Theory Proposes Earthquakes Create Gold Nuggets

New findings by Aussie researchers might undermine how gold nuggets crystallize in large veins below the surface of the earth.

Squeezes and boil during the earthquake bring to the surface water dissolved gases, metals and gold from the deep hole in the Earth’s crust. At earlier days the gold mining has been carried out on the quartz veins as both gold and quartz crystallize under similar conditions. Nevertheless, some details of gold formation have remained ambiguous and researchers from Monash University, CSIRO, and ANSTO are unveiling most of these essentials.

The current theory which is quite popular does not explain the genesis of large gold nuggets as the concentration of gold in these fluids is fairly low, comments Chris Voisey of Monash University. Dissolving gold in water is quite slow, and any gold bearing water solution is usually not in a concentration exceeding one part in a billion; and yet certain localities have deposits of gold thousands of times greater.

There are so many processes as to how gold forms and as you may well understand, no process provides satisfactory explanation as to how gold particles settle in quartz to form those huge nuggets. Voisey’s team investigated a potential connection between gold and quartz, focusing on quartz’s unique property: the piezoelectric effect which is related to the structure of piezoceramic material. Under pressure, a quartz crystal produces a voltage and in an earthquake strained static electricity may accumulate within quartz bearing seams.

As quartz is an insulator and gold is on the other hand a conductor, the researchers believed that these electric charges could induce electrochemical reactions which adsorb gold from the solutions into specific areas in the quartz. To investigate this, they immersed quartz tiles into gold solutions and then exposed the solutions to vibrational conditions that resemble earth movements. From the shaking tiles gold grains formed while there was absence of grains on tiles that were not shaken.

Accordingly, their studies propose that electrical charges elicited by quartz in earthquakes may be important in the process of the formation of conglomerate gold nuggets. Thus, one ‘pulse’ of seismic activity over several thousand years could slowly accumulate more gold and thus create big gold veins within quartz seams.