How are gold nuggets formed? Earthquakes may be the key

“If you shake quartz, it produces electricity. If you produce electricity, gold comes out,” says Christopher Voysey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of this shaking, and the team’s lab experiments show that earthquakes can produce gold nuggets.

The idea that gold nuggets could be created by electricity rather than a more traditional geological process seems strange at first. But “it makes perfect sense,” says Thomas Gernon, a geologist at the University of Southampton in England who was not involved in the new work. Quartz veins contain a disproportionate number of gold nuggets, and their environments are prone to earthquakes.

spider webs of gold

Gold is extracted from a variety of geological deposits, but it is most often found within quartz veins. From a distance, the alabaster quartz plates can look like shiny spider webs woven through the rock. Gold-bearing quartz veins are found in parts of the Earth's crust that have been subjected to a lot of stress and strain as a result of events such as mountain building.

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These stressed, deformed, fragmented areas are riddled with faults. When the faults burst during earthquakes, hot geological fluids—sometimes containing gold particles—flow into the cracks, cooling and forming veins of quartz rich in gold. “They’re typically thousands to tens of thousands of pulses of gold. [this] “The fluid that flows during earthquake events then, over time, builds up orogenic gold deposits,” Voysey says.

The fact that gold particles find their way into quartz veins is not unexpected. But inside these veins, miners tend to find large lumps of gold sitting alone rather than just tiny grains scattered everywhere. “How do you get such huge concentrations of gold in quartz veins? It’s strange and hard to explain,” says Ian Pitcairn, a mineral geologist at Stockholm University in Sweden who was not involved in the new work. Something must be forcing all the gold particles to go to specific locations, but what?

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