Earthquakes Turn Water Into Gold
Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new
study claims. Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing
gold, According to a model published in the March 17 issue of the
journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism
for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world’s gold
deposits, said Dion Weatherley, a geophysicist at the University
of Queensland in Australia and lead author of the study.
When an earthquake strikes, it moves along a rupture in the ground — a
fracture called a fault. Big faults can have many small fractures along
their length, connected by jogs that appear as rectangular voids.Water
often lubricates faults, filling in fractures and jogs.
About 6 miles (10 kilometers) below the surface, under incredible
temperatures and pressures, the water carries high concentrations
of carbon dioxide, silica and economically attractive elements
like gold.
Shake, rattle and gold
During an earthquake, the fault jog suddenly opens wider. It’s like
pulling the lid off a pressure cooker: The water inside the void
instantly vaporizes, flashing to steam and forcing silica, which forms
the mineral quartz, and gold out of the fluids and onto nearby surfaces,
suggest Weatherley and co-author Richard Henley, of the
Australian National University in Canberra.
While scientists have long suspected that sudden pressure drops could
account for the link between giant gold deposits and ancient faults,
the study takes this idea to the extreme, said Jamie Wilkinson, a
geochemist at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, who was not
involved in the study.
“To me, it seems pretty plausible. It’s something that people would
probably want to model either experimentally or numerically in a bit
more detail to see if it would actually work,” Wilkinson told
OurAmazingPlanet.
Previously, scientists suspected fluids would effervesce, bubbling
like an opened soda bottle, during earthquakes or other pressure
changes. This would line underground pockets with gold. Others suggested
minerals would simply accumulate slowly over time.
Weatherley said the amount of gold left behind after an earthquake is
tiny, because underground fluids carry at most only one part per
million of the precious element. But an earthquake zone like New
Zealand’s Alpine Fault, one of the world’s fastest, could build a
mineable deposit in 100,000 years, he said.
Surprisingly, the quartz doesn’t even have time to crystallize, the
study indicates. Instead, the mineral comes out of the fluid in the form
of nanoparticles, perhaps even making a gel-like substance on the
fracture walls. The quartz nanoparticles then crystallize over time.
[Gold Quiz: From Nuggets to Flecks]
Even earthquakes smaller than magnitude 4.0, which may rattle nerves
but rarely cause damage, can trigger flash vaporization, the study
finds.
“Given that small-magnitude earthquakes are exceptionally frequent in
fault systems, this process may be the primary driver for the formation
of economic gold deposits,” Weatherley told OurAmazingPlanet.
The hills have gold
Quartz-linked gold has sourced some famous deposits, such as the
placer gold that sparked the 19th-century California and Klondike gold
rushes. Both deposits had eroded from quartz veins upstream. Placer
gold consists of particles, flakes and nuggets mixed in with sand and
gravel in stream and river beds. Prospectors traced the gravels back to
their sources, where hard-rock mining continues today.
But earthquakes aren’t the only cataclysmic source of gold. Volcanoes
and their underground plumbing are just as prolific, if not more so, at
producing the precious metal. While Weatherley and Henley suggest that a
similar process could take place under volcanoes, Wilkinson, who
studies volcano-linked gold, said that’s not the case.
“Beneath volcanoes, most of the gold is not precipitated in faults
that are active during earthquakes,” Wilkinson said. “It’s a very
different mechanism.”
Understanding how gold forms helps companies prospect for new mines.
“This new knowledge on gold-deposit formation mechanisms may assist
future gold exploration efforts,” Weatherley said.
In their quest for gold, humans have pulled more than 188,000 tons
(171,000 metric tons) of the metal from the ground, exhausting easily
accessed sources, according to the World Gold Council, an industry
group.
Source: Business Insider
Thanks to: http://aworldchaos.wordpress.com