Earthquakes may explain how huge gold nuggets form in quartz rocks.

A replica of the Welcome Stranger, a gold coin weighing approximately 100 kilograms found in Australia in 1869.

Ian Dagnall/Alami

Earthquakes may create gold nuggets in quartz by generating an electric field that attracts gold dissolved in fluids flowing from deep within the Earth.

Massive nuggets of gold are often associated with quartz, a ubiquitous but chemically inert mineral. The world’s largest gold nuggets can weigh nearly 100 kilograms, but until now no one has been able to explain how such precious lumps of the mineral were formed.

“The puzzle was how you could create a large mass of gold in one place when there was no obvious chemical or physical trap,” says Chris Voysey of Monash University in Melbourne.

Voysey and his colleagues have now discovered a possible mechanism. When quartz is subjected to pressure, it produces an electrical potential that attracts gold dissolved in water.

The secret lies in the structure of quartz, Voisy explains. Quartz is the only abundant mineral whose crystals lack a symmetrical center. This means that when these crystals are deformed or stressed by seismic activity, their internal electromagnetic configuration changes and electricity is produced. Electricity generated in response to mechanical stress is known as piezoelectricity.

Hydrothermal fluids containing gold flow from the middle and lower crust, 15 to 20 kilometers below the surface, through fractures during seismic activity. However, the gold is so dilute that it would take the equivalent of five Olympic swimming pools of this hydrothermal fluid to produce ten kilograms of gold.

Voysey and his colleagues hypothesized that gold is concentrated into tiny clumps within the veins by the piezoelectric energy of quartz during recurring earthquakes. To test this idea, the team conducted experiments with quartz crystals placed in a solution containing gold and subjected to moderate pressures from an engine.

The unstressed quartz samples did not attract the gold, but the ones that were subjected to the force generated voltage and attracted the metal. Some of the samples were coated with iridium, which increases the piezoelectric response of quartz, artificially simulating greater seismic activity. These samples grew larger pieces of gold—over 6,000 nanometers—than the 200 to 300 nanometers in the uncoated quartz.

Once the gold started to precipitate on the quartz, it quickly began to attract more of it, Voisy says. “Because gold is an electrical conductor, there’s a preference for gold in the solution to precipitate over the gold that’s already there. It’s like a lightning rod that attracts more gold,” he says.

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