gold veins quartz

Veins of gold in quartz
An international group of scientists, with the participation of the University of Granada (UGR), has shed new light on the origin of gold, one of the most intriguing mysteries for Mankind since ancient times and which even today doesn't have an answer that convinces the scientific community.

Their work, which has been recently published in the renowned Nature Communications journal, has established that the gold came to the Earth's surface from the deepest regions of our planet. Thus, the Earth's set of internal movements would have favored the ascent and concentration of the precious metal.


The researchers belong to various universities from Chile, Australia and France, and among them there's also José María González Jiménez, a Ramón y Cajal researcher from the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology at the University of Granada.


The mantle is the layer separating the nucleus from the crust in which we all live, and its upper limit is located at about 17 kilometers under the oceans and 70 kilometers under the continents. "This distance is unreachable for Mankind, since we don't possess the means for reaching the mantle and thus knowing more about it in a direct way yet", the UGR researcher notes.

Nevertheless, the mantle can reach us thanks to volcanic eruptions, which bring with them small fragments, or 'xenoliths', from the mantle under the continents to the surface.


Research at the Deseado Massif

gold mining patagonia
© Denver Region Exploration Geologists' Society (DREGS)



This new scientific evidence could contribute to a more advanced exploration of deposits that takes into account not only surface images or 'radiographies' of the crust for their search, but also studies the depths of the mantle, a region where the origin of one of the metals that has allured our species the most could be traced to.

The study was published in the Nature Communications.