Where Does Gold Come From?

[Stand Watie]

I know a lot of you folks that have been prospecting for a lot of years are knowledgeable in geology. I'm a newcomer to prospecting, only been at it for a few months. But I have done a lot of thinking and some reading about geology and how certain minerals or rock originated. We've all heard the story about diamonds and how they are formed from carbon by pressure, heat and time. But does anyone know how gold is formed or how it came to be here on our blue planet?

I've read a couple of "theories" about it. One theory is that it got here via meteorites that hit when the Earth was young. Yet I never hear of anyone finding any recent meteorites with gold in their composition today.

So does anyone here, or does science really know where our gold came from or how it was formed/created?

 

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[TimC]

The best theory of TIME is time is NOW. We only have records and memories of the past. Any future is only NOW at that time. Time is a measurement only, not a physical thing. Time is the same everywhere, no matter how far away. If time travel was possible wouldn't you think that the world would be full of people from other times. Even wormholes don't make sense unless you represent it as a flat surface to be folded back on itself. You cannot bend something that is not physical. It is the same time here as it is 100 light years away.

TimC (No, I'm not smoking anything.)

 

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[ohiochris]

Actually this is as good as it gets. In the teachings of the I AM there is a being who manipulates energy currents and creates the gold. Gold has vibrations which are uplifting and of noble consciousness.

Hmmm,....you must read a different book than I do.


And man has successfully turned lead into gold , it just takes a nuclear reactor to do it.

 

[GrayCloud]

TimC, I'm a gettin worried about you or maybe it was me. Turned around four or five times and still ain't figured out where you came from or went to.

 

[Hot zone]

The best theory of TIME is time is NOW. We only have records and memories of the past. Any future is only NOW at that time. Time is a measurement only, not a physical thing. Time is the same everywhere, no matter how far away. If time travel was possible wouldn't you think that the world would be full of people from other times. Even wormholes don't make sense unless you represent it as a flat surface to be folded back on itself. You cannot bend something that is not physical. It is the same time here as it is 100 light years away.

TimC (No, I'm not smoking anything.)

Time travel possible, I know I got your message before you posted it.


Some of the replies remind me of Bill Cosbey's "Why is there air? (Pause) To blow up volleyballs!". So simple and and yet laughable ....

Gold is where you ain't period. I can touch it and hold it, it is real, but it is soon vanishes.

 

[allen_idaho]

Here on Earth, Gold is the byproduct of heat, pressure and the right combination of elements. Much like diamonds. It is also why you may find combinations of gold, silver, platinum, lead, iron and copper all in the same area.

Usually gold is brought to the Earth's surface in one of two ways. First being natural erosion. Second being tectonic force along fault lines pushing the material upward.

However, there is also a small percentage of gold which did come to Earth from meteorites. Along with iron, nickel, platinum, and a host of other minerals that make up these space rocks.

 

[TerryC]

Here on Earth, Gold is the byproduct of heat, pressure and the right combination of elements. Much like diamonds. It is also why you may find combinations of gold, silver, platinum, lead, iron and copper all in the same area.

Usually gold is brought to the Earth's surface in one of two ways. First being natural erosion. Second being tectonic force along fault lines pushing the material upward.

However, there is also a small percentage of gold which did come to Earth from meteorites. Along with iron, nickel, platinum, and a host of other minerals that make up these space rocks.

Allen, Heat and pressure (and hydrothermal activity) may help to concentrate gold but "the right combination of elements" is not part of the forming of gold. Gold is a base element. Broken down to its most basic part... an atom... it is still gold. That is to say, nothing combines to form gold except gold. Sorry, I am not trying to punch holes in your statement, just trying to clarify. Tnx. TTC

 

[gleaner1]

Gold and all heavy elements are proven to be formed from the slurry of matter that is transformed from hydrogen by the incredible, unimaginable forces of heat and gravity encountered in star death. Stars are hydrogen and when they die, all hell breaks loose and other elements form. The earth, the rocks, the gold cap on your tooth, your blood, you yourself, are star stuff. I know, you think I am wacky, but this is fact. Google it. Where did hydrogen come from? I don't know that. One thing is certain. Gold did not "form" on Earth. Earth is a huge conglomerate of iron, silicon, carbon, water and a slew of other elements and metals such as gold and silver and tin and lead and other crap that came together due to gravitational attraction of all the crap that formed from space junk spewed out from star deaths. All this being borne from the original hydrogen and helium in the supernovas. When our sun craps out, expect a wide array of elements to be formed and blasted forth into space like so much flotsam and jetsam. Word.

 

[TerryC]

I'll buy that Gleaner. Well said.....Stand Watie, if you want a GOOD READ on the geology of the Motherlode try "Rough-hewn land A geological journey from San Francisco to the rockie mountains" by Keith Meldahl. It is written as a history and geology book. Try it (Barnes and Noble) TTC

 

[Gravelwasher]

This has always fascinated me, where did au come from? Every time I asked I would get a dif. reply so I started seaking out info from geologists and even they are divided. I ran across an article in a gem and treasure magazine that gave me a good idea that I liked but still dosent tell u where the au actually came from, leading me to believe no one really knows. If you look hard enough you will find some documentation on a nuclear reactor that created some radio active unstable gold in siberia or somewhere when the lead next to the reactor turned to gold. So whether we have a huge reactor at the center of the earth or if gold is created in space it still seams to point in the same direction of fision/fusion to create it. This article is really good heres a pc of it and a link..
Two elements sometimes found inside gold, rhenium and osmium, help serve as a radioactive clock. Rhenium naturally decays into osmium over very long spans of time—it takes about 42.3 billion years for half of a sample of rhenium to transmute, or some 10 times the age of Earth. By dissolving gold grains in acid and measuring the ratio of rhenium to osmium inside the sample, scientists can determine the gold's age.
It turns out gold from three places in the Rand is three billion years old, "a quarter of a billion years older than its surrounding rock," Kirk said, thus supporting the placer model. Origin of World's Largest Gold Deposit Found? Hope you enjoy..Gravelwasher

 

[Ammonhotep]

If hydrogen just happened to be in the universe before the first star, then why not gold as well? To argue otherwise would call into question the origin of hydrogen ... and then, theoretically, we might have our own super nova on our hands.

 

[Hot zone]

Science would not exist without mathematics. Mathematics uses theories. Ergo science is theory. We all, using our own suedoscience have then our own theories. Some prefer dowsing for gold and others " not so much".

 

[Stand Watie]

TerryC,
Thanks for the heads up on the book. I'll check it out.
▬ ▬

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. There are a lot of good replies here and it's obvious a lot of thought was put into some of those. I asked the question because I honestly want to know and have no idea where it came from or how it originated. I did some searching online and it seems the "experts" have about as many different ideas and theories as we do. Here's one article from Science Daily that says all the "accessible" gold came from meteorite strikes on Earth:

Where does all Earth's gold come from? Precious metals the result of meteorite bombardment, rock analysis finds

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2011) — Ultra high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provides clear evidence that the planet's accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after Earth was formed.

The research is published in Nature.

During the formation of Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals -- such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core to cover the entire surface of Earth with a four-metre thick layer.

The removal of gold to the core should leave the outer portion of Earth bereft of bling. However, precious metals are tens to thousands of times more abundant in Earth's silicate mantle than anticipated. It has previously been argued that this serendipitous over-abundance results from a cataclysmic meteorite shower that hit Earth after the core formed. The full load of meteorite gold was thus added to the mantle alone and not lost to the deep interior.

To test this theory, Dr Matthias Willbold and Professor Tim Elliott of the Bristol Isotope Group in the School of Earth Sciences analysed rocks from Greenland that are nearly four billion years old, collected by Professor Stephen Moorbath of the University of Oxford. These ancient rocks provide a unique window into the composition of our planet shortly after the formation of the core but before the proposed meteorite bombardment.

The researchers determined the tungsten isotopic composition of these rocks. Tungsten (W) is a very rare element (one gram of rock contains only about one ten-millionth of a gram of tungsten) and, like gold and other precious elements, it should have entered the core when it formed. Like most elements, tungsten is composed of several isotopes, atoms with the same chemical characteristics but slightly different masses. Isotopes provide robust fingerprints of the origin of material and the addition of meteorites to Earth would leave a diagnostic mark on its W isotope composition.

Dr Willbold observed a 15 parts per million decrease in the relative abundance of the isotope 182W between the Greenland and modern day rocks. This small but significant change is in excellent agreement with that required to explain the excess of accessible gold on Earth as the fortunate by-product of meteorite bombardment.

Dr Willbold said: "Extracting tungsten from the rock samples and analysing its isotopic composition to the precision required was extremely demanding given the small amount of tungsten available in rocks. In fact, we are the first laboratory world-wide that has successfully made such high-quality measurements."

The impacting meteorites were stirred into Earth's mantle by gigantic convection processes. A tantalising target for future work is to study how long this process took. Subsequently, geological processes formed the continents and concentrated the precious metals (and tungsten) in ore deposits which are mined today.

Dr Willbold continued: "Our work shows that most of the precious metals on which our economies and many key industrial processes are based have been added to our planet by lucky coincidence when the Earth was hit by about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material."

This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

 

[Hot zone]

Dr Willbold the first to perform such exacting analysis and then makes conclusions. Willbold is bold indeed. The bombardment needs to be independently verified.

 

[gpg]

Ussen. Ask Nana.

 

[Gravelwasher]

Was doing some reading and came across this....Where did the gold in your jewelry originate? No one is completely sure. The relative average abundance in our Solar System appears higher than can be made in the early universe, in stars, and even in typical supernova explosions. Some astronomers have recently suggested that neutron-rich heavy elements such as gold might be most easily made in rare neutron-rich explosions such as the collision of neutron stars. Pictured above is an artist's illustration depicting two neutron stars spiraling in toward each other, just before they . Since neutron star collisions are also suggested as the origin of short duration gamma-ray bursts, it is possible that you already own a souvenir from one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

So thats what NASA has to say about au.....APOD: 2008 May 18 - On the Origin of Gold

 

[Gravelwasher]

Wow!! have no idea how the video got here, nice video of colliding binary neutron stars though.

 

[loby]

Hiiii...

Here is the history of Gold..

History of gold

 

[charlotte49er]

44 minutes long, but well worth the watch! IMO

 

[Astrobouncer]

Thanks for the link Brian, that was great.

 

[TheNewCatfish]

Gold appears to be a product of extrenme volcanic activity. At least, that's where you commonly find it. Locate a mountain with a "caldera" (the emptying of a magma chamber beneath a volcano), and you'll likely find a history of gold mining somewhere in the vicinity. Note however, a caldera collapse and a volcanic "eruption" are not the same thing. Over thousands of years a volcano may erupt (ejecting magma hundreds of feet into the atmosphere) many times without a collapse of the magma chamber itself. Caldera collapses are "huge" geological events. One of the largets natural events on the planet, releasing energy many times the total of all the exising nuclear weapons in our man made inventory of destructive weapons. In extreme cases, the depression left by a caldera collapse can be 30 or 40 miles across. The enormous size of such a "super caldera" can make it virtually unrecognizable to anyone looking at it from ground level.