Earth’s largest gold reserves are not kept inside Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository.
Earth’s largest gold reserves are not kept inside Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository. In fact, they are hidden much deeper in the ground than one would expect. More than 99.999% of Earth’s stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 km of solid rock, locked away within the Earth’s metallic core and far beyond the reaches of humankind. Now, researchers from the University of Göttingen have found traces of the precious metal Ruthenium (Ru) in volcanic rocks on the islands of Hawaii that must ultimately have come from the Earth’s core. The findings were published in Nature.
Compared to the Earth’s rocky mantle, the metallic core contains a slightly higher abundance of a particular Ru isotope: 100Ru. This is because part of the Ru, which was locked in the Earth’s core together with gold and other precious metals when it formed 4.5 billion years ago, came from a different source than the scarce amount of Ru that is contained in the mantle today. These differences in 100Ru are so tiny that it was impossible to detect them in the past. Now, new procedures developed by researchers at the University of Göttingen made it possible to resolve them. The unusually high 100Ru signal they found in lavas on the Earth’s surface can only mean that these rocks ultimately originated from the core-mantle boundary.
Read more at: University of Gottingen
Researchers from Göttingen found tiny traces of the precious metal Ruthenium with an anomalous isotopic composition in lavas from Hawaii. The new findings prove that the Earth’s core is leaking metallic material, including gold and other precious metals. (Photo Credit: United States Geological Survey, M. Patrick)
