When strained by earthquakes, underground networks of quartz veins can generate enough voltage to snatch gold from passing fluids, researchers report September 2 in Nature Geoscience. The findings explain how fluids carrying meager amounts of gold can concoct large nuggets, even in chemically inert settings.
“You find a 2-meter-wide quartz vein, and there’s a big gold nugget right in the middle, and nothing around [that] it could have reacted with,” says geologist Christopher Voisey of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “That’s a conundrum.”
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