Volcanoes inspire both awe and majesty in people around the world. They can be deadly forces of Mother Nature, but most are dormant, extinct, or benign and do not pose a direct threat to humans. While there are implications for ashfall covering urban areas or grounding flights, for the most part, volcanoes live as sentinels on the Earth, watching since millions of years ago.
Some volcanoes might even bring untold riches with every eruption, which is the case with Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii. Many people do not know that volcanoes can spew out rare earth metals that remain hidden in lava, which eventually hardens into volcanic rock.
A Rare Earth Metal
Among these rare earth metals, volcanoes can bring up gold from deep inside the Earth. This makes volcanoes a surprising source of gold, but it’s not what you’d think – there aren’t huge nuggets of gold coming out, but rather tiny flecks almost too small to see.
Gold is perhaps the most sought-after rare metal when it comes to jewelry, but it also has applications in anything from electronics to dentistry to space exploration. The gold that comes out of volcanoes is extremely old and comes from deep inside the Earth, traveling a long way to come to the surface.
Coming Up From The Deep
While most gold is mined only down a few hundred feet, the deepest gold mine in the world goes about 2.5 miles into the ground. This may seem very deep, but most of the Earth’s gold sits much deeper than that, and in order to come out of a volcano, it has to get there somehow.
The current theory is that gold is picked up, along with other elements, by magma and moves up from the Earth’s core all the way up to the mantle and then the crust. It eventually makes its way to the erupting volcano.
Leveraging New Technology
This phenomenon has most likely been happening for as long as volcanoes have been erupting, but we wouldn’t have been able to understand the long journey that gold takes without leveraging modern technology. As scientists became captivated by not only the sky and the sea, they looked straight down to the bowels of the Earth.
Using scientific methods, researchers can study the isotopes that are found in elements like ruthenium, which are often found alongside gold. This way, they can tell where the gold came from.
The Gold Present In Volcanic Rock
Now that we understand how gold gets into the volcano before it erupts let’s try to figure out just how much gold is trapped inside of the magma, which eventually becomes hard volcanic rock. While its eruptions can vary significantly, Kīlauea expels around 0.3 cubic miles of lava during an event.
This area calculated in grams equals to around 500 trillion grams of volcanic rock. Scientists have estimated that gold is present in volcanic rock at about 36 grams per billion. So, in every billion grams of rock that’s present, there are about 36 grams of gold.
Tons Of Gold
Adding up all of the rock together with how much gold is present equals about 18 metric tonnes of gold. This isn’t a lot of gold when compared to the amount of volcanic rock that is present, with all of it trapped in 500 trillion grams of volcanic rock.
Eighteen metric tonnes is just short of 20 short tons, and while the price of gold fluctuates, let’s say it’s an average of $106.5 per gram, which is $3000 an ounce. This would put the total value of the gold in the volcanic rock at almost $2 billion. However, there’s a good reason this gold has already been mined, and that’s because of the dilution of gold to volcanic rock.
Mining
Mining and extracting gold from rock isn’t a cheap process, and usually it’s only worth it in areas of high gold density. This is why gold mines are worth so much.
In the case of Kīlauea, the trillions of grams of rock would have to be processed in order to get the tiny particles of gold present inside. The ratio of gold to rock means that the cost of the operation would be more than the total value of the gold. Imagine processing a billion grams of rock only to find $105,6 worth of gold.
Still A Fascinating Discovery
While Kīlauea volcano’s gold being extracted could cripple government entities and private companies alike, it is still a fascinating discovery that has implications for what we know about the planet we live on.
Gold making its way to a volcano’s caldera means that it managed to travel up from the deepest parts of the Earth. If it came from the core, which is hotter than the surface of the sun, it means that it isn’t sealed off as previously thought.
Impact On Wildlife
Kīlauea is a volcano that captivates tourists and locals alike with its impressive eruptions, but they have other implications beyond spewing out wealth. An impact on local wildlife. Lava destroys surrounding habitats by melting forests, and ash is released into the air, polluting it and eventually landing on the ground, covering entire habitats with ash. Many plants suffocate underneath the ash, which means that entire ecosystems collapse.
While this destruction can be devastating, it’s a part of nature, and as volcanoes smother out life close to their summits, it can pave the way for new animals and plant life to emerge in the aftermath. Kīlauea has a lot to give – majesty, hidden wealth, and environmental resets, but it also can take away life in the blink of an eye.
A Trove Of Wealth
Many people who behold the majesty of volcanoes may not understand the true scope of what’s contained inside the red-hot lava, but it is an ephemeral glimpse into an unimaginable amount of wealth, even if it can never be extracted.
Volcanoes will continue to stand watch in our world, dictating which life around them lives and gets snuffed out. As technology advances, we’ll learn more about these ancient behemoths and gain a better understanding of our world in the process.
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