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Gold veins produced in an instant during earthquakes, new study claims
Long thought to be a slow process, a new study published in Nature Geoscience says that gold veins are produced in an instant by earthquakes.
Scientists have long known that veins of gold and other precious minerals form around fault lines, but it was generally thought that this process took an extremely long time.
However, the new study shows that quick changes in pressure could cause the gold to form, essentially, instantaneously.
What this means is that there are small bits of gold trapped in underground water flows that are super-heated and under super-high pressure. When the Earth shifts during a quake, the pressure on the water drops a thousandfold nearly instantly. Since the water is super-heated, the pressure was the only thing keeping it in liquid form. When the pressure goes away, it flash vapourizes and the elements within it, such as gold, remain in veins through the rock. (TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images)
Amateur prospector finds massive, $260,000 gold nugget buried under bush
When an amateur prospector with a metal detector found something under a bush in Ballarat, Australia, he thought it was part of a car hood. Then he saw “a glint of gold.”
When he started scraping away dirt, “the gold kept expanding and expanding,” a friend of the unidentified man told the BBC. When he finished, he’d revealed the full scale of his find: a 22-cm-long hunk of gold weighing 5.5 kg.
It’s now up for sale for $260,000. (YouTube)
Gold runs in their veins: A modern family of prospectors
It is an awkward moment, and it happens all the time. Jessica Bjorkman will meet a stranger, a new face in town, and if they start talking, and if the conversation winds around to the inevitable career question — ‘‘So, what do you do for a living?’’ — she will sigh, just a little. See, it is complicated.
Ms. Bjorkman is not a wild-eyed old man with a grizzled beard yodeling around the great north woods on the back of a donkey. And she does not live in the Yukon. And she has not memorized all the words to Robert Service poem, the Cremation of Sam McGee.
So when she tells someone, “I am a prospector,” that someone will invariably shoot her a curious look.
“Most everybody is surprised,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “I say we go out looking for rocks that have potential. We are the step before a mine, basically, we are the ones out there, on the ground, looking for something promising.”
She is looking for the same thing that the old guy on the donkey was looking for in the Klondike, circa 1898: Gold.
The 31-year-old is not alone in her passion for pursuing a lucky strike. She inherited the gold bug from her father, Karl, as did her five younger siblings, all of whom, save for the baby, Karla, who is still in high school, are prospectors and employees of Bjorkman Prospecting, an all-in-the-family northwestern Ontario enterprise that is as rare as the precious metal they seek. Jessica’s mother, Nikki, keeps the books.
They are a family that moils for gold.
Photo: Independance Pass on the way to Aspen, Colorado: Dad (Karl), Mom (Nikki), Karla, Katarina, Jessica, Bjorn in 2009. (Courtesy Jessica Bjorkman)
Scrooge McDuck tops Forbes’ ‘Fictional 15′ list
A miserly duck, a vampire and pair of precocious kids are among the richest fictional characters, according to a ranking by Forbes.
Scrooge McDuck, the “penny-pinching poultry” with a fortune in gold coins whose estimated worth is US$44.1-billion, headed the list of Forbes‘ “Fictional 15″ wealthiest imaginary characters. But despite his riches, McDuck still trails Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ US$53-billion.
Vampire-themed franchises have become big business, so it’s no surprise that Carlisle Cullen, the 370-year-old vampire from the Twilight books and films who has been accruing interest on a small savings account since 1670, came in second with US$36.2-billion.
