Gold, other precious metals are leaking from the core to Earth’s surface – National | Globalnews.ca
Gold, hidden deep within the Earth’s core, is making its way to the surface of our planet, leaking through the mantle and into the crust, scientists have found.
A new study out of Germany, examining isotopes found in volcanic rock that has oozed from Earth’s deepest reaches, has found that precious metals are abundant in the core.
“When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold!” geochemist Nils Messling of Göttingen University in Germany said in a press release shared late last week on his team’s findings.
“Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into the Earth’s mantle above.”
Before you get too excited, however, it’s important to remember that these materials, which also include precious metals like ruthenium and platinum, exist beneath more than 2,900 km of solid rock, meaning it’s unlikely the natural treasure chest will ever be cracked open.
As it stands, it’s believed that more than 99 per cent of the Earth’s gold supply is in its metallic core. A 2006 study estimates that the amount of gold housed in the core is enough to cover all of Earth’s land 50 cm thick.
Graphic representation of Earth’s shell structure showing the super-heated metallic inner core in the centre, followed by the solid outer core, the rocky mantle and the thin crust towards the surface. New research from the University of Göttingen demonstrates that some precious metal-rich material from the core is leaking into the Earth’s mantle above.
Courtesy / University of Göttingen / OpenAI
But the scientists involved in the groundbreaking study say that the ramifications of their work are significant, in that they now know that parts of the Earth’s core, which was once thought to be inaccessible, are able to reach the surface during volcanic eruptions.
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“Our findings not only show that the Earth’s core is not as isolated as previously assumed,” said the study’s co-author, geochemist Matthias Willbold.
“We can now also prove that huge volumes of superheated mantle material — several hundred quadrillion metric tons of rock — originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to the Earth’s surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii.”
The scientists, whose findings were published in Nature, found that their samples of volcanic rock contained slightly higher abundance of a particular Ru isotope than what is found in samples taken from the mantle today.
They’ve determined that these miniscule differences, at one point impossible to measure, confirmed that the precious metals are coming from the core.
Now, the researchers say that more work can be done, combining the results of their study with past research, to better understand the formation of precious metal deposits and, hopefully, where to find them.
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