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Economic geology

Gilded by earthquakes

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 248–250 (2013)Cite this article

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Gold is often deposited in Earth's crust by fluids that percolate through rock fractures. Earthquakes cause rock fractures to expand rapidly and could cause the fluids to evaporate, triggering almost instantaneous gold deposition.

Devastating tsunamis in Indonesia, Chile and Japan over the past few years have demonstrated the ability of earthquakes to shift large volumes of water on Earth's surface. However, earthquakes can also have a dramatic effect on the flow of water deep within Earth's crust. These fluids often contain significant amounts of dissolved minerals, such as silica and gold. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Weatherley and Henley1 show that in the instant an earthquake occurs, a sudden drop in pressure can cause water trapped within pockets of rock to vaporize and deposit its dissolved gold.

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Figure 1: Schematic illustration of flash vaporization during an earthquake.

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  1. Dave Craw is in the Geology Department, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand,

    Dave Craw

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  1. Dave Craw
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Correspondence to Dave Craw.

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Craw, D. Gilded by earthquakes. Nature Geosci 6, 248–250 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1775

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