Geologists have known for decades that gold forms in quartz with the help of earthquakes, but now they have worked out exactly how the setting and seismic waves combine to form large nuggets.

Extracting Gold from Rock by Mike Leahy. Crushing the rock Powdering the rock Mercury ... We're after pure gold, but rock that contains gold also includes lots of other materials such as quartz, ...

Gold, Quartz, and Earthquakes: A Surprising Trio. Most of the world’s gold is hidden in underground veins of quartz, a mineral formation that geologists have long studied but still do not ...

Industrial gold-plating works in much the same way, only here we are gold-plating other gold. Back to nuggets Now we know how quartz and gold behave this way in the lab, we can think about geology ...

In theory, the gold should cover the quartz evenly, because the hydrothermal fluids cover its surface. But in reality, the nuggets only form in concentrated areas.

Gold explorer Sitka Gold (WKN A2JG70 / TSXV SIG) continues to observe increasing amounts of visible gold at its RC Gold ...

East-Southeast trending zone of sheeted quartz veining and brecciation with visible gold identified at the Contact zone, located immediately south of the Pukelman intrusion, with surface rock ...

But this theory doesn't explain why large—sometimes hundred-pound—gold nuggets accumulate within quartz veins; there simply isn't enough gold in Earth's upper layers to create massive chunks ...