According to a study conducted by a group of Australian scientists, earthquakes help in the formation of gold deposits.
Research conducted by scientists from the University of Queensland and the Australian National University have found a direct link between earthquakes and the formation of gold deposits. It's always been a mystery to humans how certain rocks and elements form, especially gold. Now, through the new study, scientists confirmed that 80 percent of the world's gold deposits have been formed in the blink of an eye due to earthquakes.
Through the study, geophysicist Dr. Dion Weatherley said that even small earthquakes can cause gold deposits to form, and that this has far-reaching implications.
"Earthquakes may well be the primary mechanism for concentrating gold within quartz veins to form mineable ore deposits," Weatherley said.
According to Weatherley, the mathematical model used in the study calculates the impact earthquakes have on fluids in fault zones.
"They expected for any given vein, depending on its size, it may be years to tens of years for the fracture to fill up with quartz and the associated metals such as gold," Weatherley said. "The most surprising aspect of the mathematical modeling was that we thought there was a good chance that very large magnitude earthquakes might be able to achieve this, but what we actually found is that even very small magnitude earthquakes [do so]. It was a bit hard to imagine that very small earthquakes - in the order of magnitude two to magnitude four - would do much work on the fluid. But when we did the calculations we found that, in fact, a magnitude four earthquake was far and away large enough to produce a massive pressure differential of the order of about 1,000 times."
Weatherley also clarifies that the gold deposited during any one earthquake would be in quite small amounts. However, owing to the possibility that hundreds of magnitude 4.0 quakes and thousands of smaller magnitude quakes may occur each year, the amount of gold deposited is large.
