Study reveals that earthquakes may cause quartz to turn into giant gold blocks

Scientists have discovered exactly how earthquakes cause quartz to form large gold nuggets — and have finally solved a mystery that has puzzled researchers for decades.

Gold occurs naturally in quartz—the second most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust after feldspar. But unlike other types of gold deposits, those in quartz often cluster in giant clumps. These clumps float in the middle of what geologists call quartz veins, cracks in quartz-rich rocks that are periodically pumped with hydrothermal fluids from deep within the crust.

“Gold is forming in quartz all the time,” Chris Voysey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and lead author of a new study published Monday (Sept. 2) in the journal Nature Geoscience, told Live Science. “The weird thing is that you get really big gold nuggets. We didn’t know how that happened — how you get a lot of gold to mineralize in a small, discrete place.”

Hydrothermal fluids carry gold particles from deep within and push them through quartz veins, which in theory means the gold should spread evenly across cracks rather than being concentrated into tiny clumps, Voysey said. These tiny clumps are exceptionally valuable, accounting for up to 75 percent of all gold ever mined, according to the study.

Two separate pieces of evidence helped solve the gold nugget mystery, Voysey and his colleagues said. The first is that the largest gold nuggets are found in orogenic gold deposits, which are deposits formed during earthquakes. The second is that quartz is a piezoelectric mineral, meaning it creates its own electrical charge in response to geological stresses, such as those generated by earthquakes.

Related: Why is gold so weak?

“When you put all these elements together, it becomes more complicated,” Voisy said. The researchers found that earthquakes fracture rocks and force hydrothermal fluids into quartz veins, filling them with molten gold. In response to the earthquake stress, the quartz veins simultaneously generate an electrical charge that interacts with the gold, causing it to precipitate and solidify.

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The gold is concentrated in specific areas, Voysey notes, because “gold dissolved in the solution preferentially deposits on pre-existing gold grains. The gold essentially acts as an electrode for further reactions by adopting the voltage generated by nearby quartz crystals.”

That means the gold solidifies in quartz veins in clusters that grow larger with each earthquake. The largest gold nuggets found so far weigh about 130 pounds (60 kilograms), Voysey said.

In quartz veins, gold solidifies preferentially over existing gold deposits, forming large clusters of blocks. (Image credit: Pierre Longnus via Getty Images)

To test this idea, the researchers simulated the effect of an earthquake on quartz crystals in the lab. They immersed the crystals in a liquid containing gold and repeated the seismic waves to generate a piezoelectric charge. The experiment confirmed that under geological pressure, quartz can produce a voltage high enough to precipitate gold from solution.

The simulation also confirmed that gold solidifies preferentially over gold deposits in quartz veins, helping to explain the formation of large gold nuggets.

“Having the pre-existing gold and having it act as a catalyst or lightning rod that other gold might stick to was very exciting,” Voisey said.

One of the implications of this study is that scientists can now grow large gold nuggets in the lab, but it’s not chemistry, Voysey says. “You have to put the gold in a solution and then turn it from being a liquid into a sticky substance,” he says.

But the results don’t offer geologists and exploration companies new clues about where to mine gold. The best science can offer right now, Voysey says, is a device that detects piezoelectric signals from quartz at great depths. “That can tell you where the quartz veins are—but it can’t tell you whether there’s gold in those quartz veins.”

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