How do large gold nuggets form in quartz crystals during earthquakes?

When earthquakes stress quartz crystals, the mineral generates electricity that attracts gold particles. Pierre Longnus via Getty Images

Earthquakes may help gold prospectors find it: When these seismic events move and squeeze quartz veins deep in the Earth, the mineral creates an electric field in which gold particles clump together, forming giant gold nuggets.

Geologists have known that earthquakes can produce nuggets of gold on quartz. However, a new study published last week in the journal Nature Geoscience details how seismic waves create these coveted gold nuggets, helping to solve a long-standing mystery about how gold clumps together and grows into large, valuable pieces.

“Gold is forming in quartz all the time,” Chris Voysey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, told Live Science's Sasha Barry. “The weird thing is that you're forming 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.”

Quartz can generate electrical charges when squeezed, stretched, compressed or vibrated, and is known to power quartz watches. The type of charge produced is called piezoelectricity, and quartz is the only abundant mineral on Earth that produces it, according to the study.

Scientists conducted laboratory experiments to test how gold clumps form on quartz crystals. Lynn Kennedy via Getty Images

According to the paper, about 75 percent of the gold mined on Earth comes from deposits in quartz fissures. The precious metal forms naturally in quartz when it’s bathed in hydrothermal fluids from the Earth’s crust that contain molten gold. In theory, the gold should cover the quartz evenly, since the hydrothermal fluids cover its surface. But in reality, clumps only form in concentrated areas. So the team of researchers based in Australia wanted to find out why.

To study how earthquakes help create gold nuggets, the scientists conducted laboratory experiments on quartz slabs immersed in a gold-rich liquid. They then simulated seismic waves by placing the slabs in a machine that mimics the shaking motion of an earthquake. They then examined the quartz and found gold all over its surface.

Simply put: “If you shake quartz, it generates electricity. If you generate electricity, gold comes out,” from the hydrothermal fluid in the Earth’s crust, Voysey tells National Geographic’s Robin George Andrews.

This process happens because quartz is an insulator, and gold is a conductor. Any gold that forms on the crystal takes the voltage from the quartz and acts as a magnet for additional gold particles in the Earth's hydrothermal fluid. In this way, more gold is extracted from solution in areas that already have gold grains. “Essentially, the quartz acts as a natural battery, slowly accumulating more gold as an electrode with each seismic event,” Voisy told Newsweek's Tom Howarth.

With each passing earthquake, the gold nuggets grow. The largest gold nuggets in orogenic gold deposits — those that form between tectonic plates that have collided to form mountain ranges — weigh about 130 pounds, Live Science reports. In nature, gold nuggets are more likely to form not as a result of a single earthquake but as a result of multiple ones.

“It certainly seems likely that intermittent earthquakes are important in helping to create these important ‘mountain’ gold deposits,” James Saunders, a consulting geologist who was not involved in the study, told Kate Graham Shaw of Scientific American. Future research could be more specific, he adds—how long does an earthquake take to create a gold nugget, and why do these deposits only form in certain quartz veins in the area?

“I think it's a great idea/hypothesis. I'd be interested if it holds up after further evaluation,” he adds in the post.

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Categorized under: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Earth's Crust, Earthquakes, Electricity, Geology, Gold, Minerals, New Research

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