Humanity’s fascination with gold stretches back thousands of years. Gold mining is described in ancient Greek and Roman sources, and gold rushes – especially in the 19th century – played a powerful ...

Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky: Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. People have long been fascinated by nuggets, large aggregates of ...

We can't usually feel them, but dozens of earthquakes occur every day—and some of them are using mundane minerals to make glittering gold. Researchers have found that tectonic shifts put just the ...

"Remarkably, the gold had a tendency to deposit on existing gold grains rather than forming new ones." This is because, while quartz is an electrical insulator, gold is a conductor. Once some gold is ...

When strained by earthquakes, underground networks of quartz veins can generate enough voltage to snatch gold from passing fluids, researchers report September 2 in Nature Geoscience. The findings ...