Jakarta –
Gold is one of the most valuable metals in the world. Many seek to find gold by mining it. But you know secondsthat all this time we were standing on a gold mine?
In an IFL Science report on Tuesday (August 29, 2023), even though it’s in a gold mine, we can’t get it easily because the gold is buried deep in there and hard to get to.
The core of the Earth itself is filled with various minerals such as iron, nickel, and gold, but the exact amount is unknown. Then in 2006, a group of scientists led by Professor Bernard Wood of Macquarie University came up with a method to find out the amount of gold buried in the ground.
The method used by Wood himself was carried out by examining meteorites from the remains of asteroids, which have similar properties and the same elements as the Earth. Some asteroids have a composition similar to Earth’s because they go through the same formation process, he said.
The composition of the meteorite is then used as a reference to measure the composition of material on Earth. As a result of this study, it was found that elements that are insoluble in liquid iron do not exist in the Earth’s core. Consequently, there are elements that are equally abundant in the earth’s crust compared to the earth’s core.
The results of research methods conducted by Wood and other scientists show that 99% of the gold in the earth is actually buried in the core of the earth itself. “We can say that more than 99% of the earth’s gold is in the core of the Earth,” Wood told ABC.
This means that the surviving asteroids also dispersed in large numbers from the same elements. Therefore, NASA plans to launch a probe to Psyche, the heaviest asteroid, within 2 months.
The Psyche mission report stated that if there were any sources of precious metals, prices would drop sharply. This also applies to minerals locked up in the bowels of the Earth.
“It’s great to think that we can all go and do these things,” Wood said, but if we did, no one would care.
(fdl/fdl)