Bottom Feeder
Ground Beetle
Gold Nuggets Created In a Matter Of Seconds
earth.com
For more than a century, geologists looked at bright metal streaks in quartz and explained that super‑hot fluids moved through cracks in the rock, carried dissolved gold, and then left that gold behind when conditions changed. That idea explains a lot, but it raises a tough question: those fluids usually carry only tiny amounts of gold compared with the volume of water, so how can that kind of solution leave behind large nuggets inside quartz?
When a quartz crystal is squeezed, bent, or twisted, its atomic structure shifts enough to separate positive and negative charges. One side of the crystal becomes relatively positive, the other relatively negative, so a voltage appears across it.
Quartz acts as an electrical insulator and does not let electrons move easily through its interior, which makes it hard to start nugget growth from nothing. When stress created an electric field in the quartz, those metal grains concentrated the field around themselves, so new gold nanoparticles tended to grow on and around the older ones, forming halos and tight clusters. Once there is even a tiny “seed” of gold, that grain becomes the preferred place for more gold to plate out during each stress event.
When the quartz is stressed, particles no longer stay spread out evenly in the fluid. They drift, gather, and clump into larger clusters directly on the quartz surface. As the reactions continue, the system develops a “rich get richer” pattern: fewer, larger gold pieces rather than many tiny ones.
earth.com
For more than a century, geologists looked at bright metal streaks in quartz and explained that super‑hot fluids moved through cracks in the rock, carried dissolved gold, and then left that gold behind when conditions changed. That idea explains a lot, but it raises a tough question: those fluids usually carry only tiny amounts of gold compared with the volume of water, so how can that kind of solution leave behind large nuggets inside quartz?
When a quartz crystal is squeezed, bent, or twisted, its atomic structure shifts enough to separate positive and negative charges. One side of the crystal becomes relatively positive, the other relatively negative, so a voltage appears across it.
Quartz acts as an electrical insulator and does not let electrons move easily through its interior, which makes it hard to start nugget growth from nothing. When stress created an electric field in the quartz, those metal grains concentrated the field around themselves, so new gold nanoparticles tended to grow on and around the older ones, forming halos and tight clusters. Once there is even a tiny “seed” of gold, that grain becomes the preferred place for more gold to plate out during each stress event.
When the quartz is stressed, particles no longer stay spread out evenly in the fluid. They drift, gather, and clump into larger clusters directly on the quartz surface. As the reactions continue, the system develops a “rich get richer” pattern: fewer, larger gold pieces rather than many tiny ones.