really large gold nugget formation. We didn’t know how that worked—how you get a large volume of gold to mineralize in one discreet little place.” Quartz can generate electrical charges ...

But these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky: Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth’s squashed-up ...

Earthquakes may cause gold nuggets to form in quartz by generating an electric field that attracts gold dissolved in fluid forced up from deep underground. Enormous gold nuggets are often ...

Solid gold bars stacked in bank vaults, plating on the summer’s Olympic medals, or even your own pieces of gold jewelry ... gold nugget deposits might develop in only some cracks in quartz ...

The findings explain how fluids carrying meager amounts of gold can concoct large nuggets, even in chemically inert settings. “You find a 2-meter-wide quartz vein, and there’s a big gold ...

The answer lies in the unremarkable but ubiquitous mineral that gold nuggets are found in: quartz. Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when put ...

In a paper published Monday in Nature Geoscience, geologists in Australia write that piezoelectricity is the secret to quartz-produced nuggets of gold. Piezoelectric materials are solids that ...

Findings suggest gold nuggets can form in quartz veins as a result of electricity produced by the pressure of earthquakes. The gold is carried in super-hot liquids from the Earth's core to its ...