A large part of gold ’s allure is its rarity . Even so , it ’s still 1000 times more abundant on Earth than it should be . Boffins atUniversity of Bristolnow have an account for this phenomenon : it come from ouuuuter spaaaaaace !
In theory , most of the gold , and other heavy metals like tungsten , that were around during Earth ’s origination would have been sucked into the nucleus during its establishment because of their relatively high mass and density ; thus leaving behind a crust bereft of bling . While this make sense logically , it intelligibly does n’t mesh with world . Humans have been mining gold for millennium despite not get approach to the core .
After equate tungsten concentration from samplings of the world ’s oldest rocks ( formed about 4 billion years ago ) with those of more modern rocks , scientist found that forward-looking stone stop importantly more tungsten than their ancient counterparts . Since gold , tungsten , and precious metals in general behave similarly when it comes to geological formation , this mean that the original impudence contained far fewer wanted metal than modern ones . Through further research , they were able to associate this alteration to an exact upshot : the “ concluding bombardment ” .
Far from being an Schwarzenneger moving picture , “ terminal bombardment ” refers to a gigantic meteor shower ( or rather hurricane ) that demand property around 3.9 billion years ago . It lie in of 20 billion billion tons [ not a typo ] of meteorites dash into the latterly - formed Earth ’s insolence . Damn , nature … It ’s these asteroid that endow Earth with virtually all the metal that we ’ve come to depend on for so many purposes . After all , where would civilisation be today withoutgrillz ? [ University of Bristol , BBC ] Image fromNASA : William Moede et al
EarthGeologymeteor showerScienceSpace
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