The biggest finding is showing a new gold-forming process and providing an explanation for how really large gold nuggets might form, says Chris Voisey, a co-author of the study and a geologist at Monash University in Australia.
Geochemists have known that dissolved gold existed in fluids in the middle to lower levels of the planet's crust and that the fluids could seep into quartz cracks. But the amount of fluid involved seemed to limit the gold that could dissolve and thus the size of the gold chunks that formed.
Larger nuggets were hard to explain: experts had theorized that gold nanoparticles within the fluid might aggregate into those bigger chunks within the quartz, yet it was unclear how.
The new study suggests that the geological stress caused by earthquakes might activate a peculiar geochemical property of gold nanoparticles, triggering a chemical reaction that leads to gold nugget formation.
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