The Earth's core is leaking gold to the surface

“The largest reserves of gold are hidden at much greater depths than one might expect. More than 99.999% of the Earth’s reserves of gold and other precious metals lie buried beneath 3,000 km of solid rock , locked within the Earth’s metallic core,” the University of Göttingen said in a statement. In fact, Professor Bernard Wood, a geologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, once said that there is enough gold buried deep within the Earth’s core to cover the entire Earth’s surface with a half-meter-thick layer of gold. Now , researchers from this institution have found that gold and other precious metals are seeping into the Earth’s mantle, reaching the surface in the Hawaiian Islands. The results of their work have been published in Nature . The contents of the core are slowly being forced up to the surface.

They discovered this by analyzing volcanic rocks for three years, in which they found the isotope ruthenium-100. The researchers explain that some of the ruthenium, which was trapped in the Earth's core along with gold and other precious metals when it formed 4.5 billion years ago, came from a different source.

The Earth's core has two layers: a solid metallic sphere composed primarily of iron and nickel, with a radius of about 1,221 kilometers, and an outer core of liquid metal that is approximately 2,253 kilometers thick. In contrast, the authors of the paper explain to CNN that the mantle, which lies between the planet's outer crust and the molten core, is 2,897 kilometers thick, mostly solid rock.

The point is that the high concentrations of ruthenium-100 indicated that the core and mantle must have different compositions of these isotopes. "This illustrates the potential of these isotopes as a new tracer for core-mantle interactions," the study notes.

Nils Messling, a scientist at the Department of Geochemistry at the University of Göttingen and lead author of the report published on May 21, explains: "When we received the first results, we realized we had struck gold. Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is seeping into the Earth's mantle."

"It was like finding a giant needle in a haystack! It's very exciting, at least for a geochemist. It was a long process, but very exciting," Messling told CNN. "About 40 years ago, the theory was first put forward that perhaps the core was losing material into the mantle, but the signals obtained until now were very ambiguous," he added. It's a slow process that leaches small amounts of these minerals.

"Our findings not only demonstrate that the Earth's core is not as isolated as previously thought. We can now also show that huge volumes of superheated mantle material originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to the Earth's surface to form oceanic islands like Hawaii," says Matthias Willbold, professor of geochemistry at Messling's university.

Scientists also say this means that at least part of the precarious supplies of gold and other precious metals, on which we depend for their value and importance in so many sectors, such as renewable energy, could come from the Earth's core. Messling notes that "it remains to be seen whether these processes we observe today also operated in the past. Our findings open up a completely new perspective on the evolution of our planet's internal dynamics."