Gold seepage from Earth's core indicated in research findings
Earth's Core Leaks Precious Metals, Researchers Discover
Astonishing findings from a recent study suggest that Earth's core is leaking gold and other precious metals, altering our understanding of the Earth's internal dynamics and the formation of regions like Hawaii.
99.9% of the planet's gold and precious metals are hidden in the Earth's core, insulated by thousands of miles of near-impenetrable rock. However, recent research indicates that some metals have migrated out of the core into enriched rocks that eventually reach the surface.
While it is unlikely that humans will ever mine Earth's core, scientists discovered signs of the precious metal ruthenium—a platinum group metal—in volcanic rocks from Hawaii, which they claim could only have come from the core-mantle boundary.
"When the first results came in, we realized we had struck gold!" Nils Messling, the study's first author and a researcher in the geochemistry department at Goettingen University in Germany, said in a statement. "Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into the Earth's mantle above."
The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature on May 21.
The Earth comprises three basic layers: a crust, mantle, and core. The crust is an outer shell, the mantle a less rigid middle layer of rocks that makes up most of the planet, and the core is a sphere in the middle, consisting of a sea of molten metals about 1,400 miles thick, called the outer core, surrounding a mostly solid iron ball, the inner core.
Previous research has found that Earth's ruthenium changed during the planet's later stages of formation, as it accumulated more material, making the ruthenium locked away in the core slightly different from the ruthenium typically found in the mantle and crust.
For the new study, the researchers analyzed volcanic rock samples from Hawaii, including those collected at a lava lake in the active and currently erupting Kilauea volcano. They compared the ruthenium detected in these samples to ruthenium typically found in the mantle and found higher concentrations of the core ruthenium in Hawaii's volcanic rocks compared to other mantle rocks, suggesting that the Hawaii ruthenium originated from Earth's center.
The detection of ruthenium linked to the core demonstrates that precious metals, including gold, can move out of the center of the Earth. This means that some of the precious metals we mine today may have originally come from the core. The study also provides insights into the formation of Hawaii and other regions tied to the core-mantle boundary.
"Our findings not only show that the Earth's core is not as isolated as previously assumed," study co-author Matthias Willbold, a professor in the geochemistry department at Goettingen University, said in the statement. "We can now also prove that huge volumes of super-heated mantle material—several hundreds of quadrillion metric tonnes of rock—originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to the Earth's surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii."
Hawaii is thought to be sitting on a deep mantle plume of hot rock, driving volcanic activity in the region. Researchers recently found new evidence that Africa is being torn apart by another deep mantle plume, which they believe probably originated from the core-mantle boundary, like the ruthenium.
- The discovery of ruthenium, a platinum group metal, in volcanic rocks from Hawaii suggests that some precious metals, such as gold, have migrated out of Earth's core and into the mantle.
- The study's findings indicate that data from environmental science, combined with the use of technology and data-and-cloud-computing, could potentially explain how some of the precious metals we mine today may have originally come from Earth's core.
