Pelican Parts Forums

This is interesting - a hypothesis that the Earth's core is rich and gold and holds 99% of all gold on the Planet.

I thought the last two paragraphs were funny:

"We can say that more than 99 per cent of the Earth's gold is in the core," he said.

"It's a nice image to think we could all step outside and be knee-deep in the stuff"

It's not a nice image . . . stepping knee deep into molten gold . . . because it would instantly burn one's legs off . . . which is not nice.

Full article:

Last Update: Thursday, June 15, 2006. 11:27pm (AEST)
Researcher calculates gold within Earth's core
By Stephen Pincock for Science Online

An Australian researcher says there is enough gold buried deep within the Earth's core to cover the entire land surface of the planet to a depth of half a metre.

Macquarie University geologist Professor Bernard Wood made his calculations based on research published in today's issue of journal Nature.

Professor Wood and his colleagues have charted the early history of Earth's development, starting with the birth of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago and focusing on the formation of Earth's molten metal core.

"By looking at other stars that are currently at the state our sun was in then, we can see that they are surrounded by a flattened disc of dust and gas," Professor Wood said.

"We know that within about 10,000 years, these formed into small bodies that were about 10 kilometres across."

Radioactive dating has shown that over the next 100,000 to one million years, those small "planetesimals" collided to form planetary embryos of a size between that of Mars and the moon.

Within 10 million to 100 million years, larger planets had formed.

"In the case of Earth, it was around 30 million years," Professor Wood said.

'Magma ocean'
Professor Wood says the Earth was probably covered in a sea of molten rock, hundreds of kilometres deep, early in its history.

He says this "magma ocean" reacted with metals during the planet's development, extracting many of the most important and interesting elements, including gold, and eventually depositing them in the Earth's own iron-rich core.

To calculate how much gold was in the Earth's core, Professor Wood compared the composition of the Earth's crust with that of meteorites, which can be used to represent planetesimals.

He and other researchers have found that the meteorites had similar levels of all elements that would not normally dissolve in iron.

But they also noted that meteorites had higher levels of elements such as gold, platinum and nickel.

"This tells us that the Earth is chemically very similar to those meteorites but the Earth's crust is depleted in all those elements that like to dissolve in iron," Professor Wood said.

He says there is only one place those elements can have gone - the molten core.

"We can say that more than 99 per cent of the Earth's gold is in the core," he said.

"It's a nice image to think we could all step outside and be knee-deep in the stuff.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1664312.htm

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Best,

Kurt