A study featured in Nature Magazine’s Geoscience section revealed that gold deposits can form almost instantaneously during earthquakes in a process called “flash vaporization.”
Quartz ‘veins’ formed by large scale movements of the earth’s crust billions of years ago have been home to a large amount of the world’s known gold reserves.
Scientists have known that these veins of gold are formed by “hot fluids flowing through cracks deep in the earth’s crust” but the idea that the process could occur within a few tenths of a second is new.
To read more about flash vaporization in the Scientific American’s breakdown of the study, click here.
Sources: Nature Geoscience; Scientific American
