Earthquake electricity offers answer to gold nugget mystery | Research

Researchers in Australia have found that pressure from earthquakes can stimulate quartz veins to generate enough electricity to form large blocks of gold.

Most gold nuggets in quartz veins occur when hydrothermal fluids containing gold move from the Earth's crust along fracture networks by earthquakes.[Quartz veins] “These rocks are formed by the accumulation of thousands of earthquakes,” says Chris Voysey, a geologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and lead author of the study. “There’s a fault that turns into a quartz vein and then it opens up repeatedly during many earthquakes… and every time it opens up, a fluid carrying gold from deep in the crust flows through it.”

The general mechanism behind gold transport and deposition is relatively well understood, but the formation of large gold masses in quartz veins has remained somewhat of a mystery, especially given the low concentration of gold in hydrothermal fluids and the chemical inertness of quartz. “In this type of situation, gold is transported in the fluid as tiny particles,” explains Laura Petrella, a geologist at the University of Western Australia, who was not involved in the study. “So we struggled to understand how large masses could form, given that we only have a small amount of gold in the fluid.”

Quartz veins are known to emit a measurable electrical charge when subjected to mechanical stress, such as an earthquake – a phenomenon known as piezoelectricity. To investigate whether earthquake-induced piezoelectric discharges from quartz could explain the formation of gold nuggets, the researchers conducted experiments using quartz slabs. The slabs were placed inside sealed chambers containing gold-rich solutions and the earthquake vibrations were mechanically replicated.

“Using our model, you have a quartz vein, which opens up during an ‘earthquake’, and a gold-rich fluid is flowing out rapidly, but the ground is shaking because it’s an earthquake, so everything is vibrating, and that vibration will put pressure on the quartz crystals in the vein wall and generate an electrical voltage,” Voysey explains. “If that voltage is high enough, above the redox potential of a gold-bearing ligand or gold-bearing molecule, then that gold will contract, and so it will separate from the molecule – and it will precipitate out as native gold.”

“pure scientific endeavour”

As expected, the vibrating quartz created an electric field, which pulled the gold nanoparticles in the solution and deposited them in granules along the vein. However, that wasn’t the end of the story.

'when [the gold] “When the gold precipitates, it then becomes a hub for continuous electron donation, because gold is a conductor and quartz is an insulator,” Voisy says. “If you have gold on a piece of quartz and you deform the quartz, it will use that voltage to donate its own electrons, and when it does that, it becomes a hub for further reduction of gold from the liquid and it will grow into a large gold nugget.”

“This was a purely scientific endeavor,” Voysey says. “The cool thing about it is that we’re explaining something we haven’t been able to explain before. We know a lot about how gold mineralizes—people have been studying it forever, but this was just one of the little things that stood out.”

Studying the electrical properties of quartz was a “new idea,” Petrella says. “It’s very interesting… Of course, these types of gold deposits are formed by fractures in the Earth’s crust, so we already know that they are formed by earthquakes… But it actually shows that a specific property of quartz may be able to trigger the precipitation of gold that is originally in the liquid.”

One limitation of this work, she says, is that the process requires the quartz to have already crystallized, which may not always be the case. “This theory works very well for what we call recharge. Recharge is when you have a vein that has already formed and has gold in it, and when you apply more pressure to that vein, you move it around, re-dissolve the gold, and then re-deposit it. So for recharge, this theory that they propose works very well.”

The researchers’ findings could have important applications in gold mining, she says. “Explorers will be really interested in knowing how to concentrate gold, because that will help them target high-grade gold deposits – and it’s obviously more environmentally friendly to mine deposits where gold is concentrated.”

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