Missing Metals: Earth's Formation Robbed Planet Of Much Gold - Study

(Kitco News) - There should be a lot more gold and silver on Earth, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature.

The precious metals can be found scattered in space, but remain rare on our planet, said one of the authors of the paper, Bernard Wood, a geologist at the University of Oxford.

“The silicate Earth is strongly depleted in moderately volatile elements (such as lead, zinc, indium and alkali elements) relative to CI chondrites, the meteorites that compositionally most closely resemble the sun,” the paper said.

After conducting a unique experiment, Wood and graduate student Ashley Norris concluded that the way Earth was formed is to blame for the missing elements.

The amount of gold that could have disappeared during the formation of Earth might have been enough to cover the planet’s entire surface in a 20-inch thick layer, according to the paper, titled “Earth’s Volatile Contents Established By Melting And Vaporization.”

In the research, Wood refers to metals such as gold and silver as “moderate volatiles,” arguing that they turn to gas at a certain temperature level. The study cites an experiment by Wood melting a mock version of early Earth in a furnace.

The experiment involved heating up a furnace to 1,300 degrees Celsius and adding carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gases to recreate Earth’s first atmosphere. Researchers then added basaltic rock mixed with volatile elements, such as zinc oxide. After heating up the contents, the sample was dropped into water in order to resemble a rapid cooling process.

“Our experiment shows that melting processes explain the pattern [of volatile depletion] perfectly,” the authors wrote. “We find that the pattern of volatile element depletion in the silicate Earth is consistent with partial melting and vaporization rather than with simple accretion of a volatile-rich chondrite-like body.”

In the meantime, the issue of how much gold is left on our planet has started to come up more frequently in the mining industry.

In one of Kitco’s most recent interviews from the Mines & Money conference in Toronto, the Goldcorp chairman said miners are just not finding gold like they used to.

“We're running out of gold as an industry,” Goldcorp official Ian Telfer said. “I think we're spending significant amounts of money exploring but it's getting harder to find.”

For the industry, this could mean a significant price surge in gold in the future, according to Telfer. “Production is starting to turn down and once that starts to turn down, I think you'll see the gold price really start to move.”

This would have been different, of course, if the Wood-Norris study’s main premise is correct and the Earth was still coated with gold.

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