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 ...

Gold nuggets have long fascinated scientists and prospectors alike, but the precise mechanisms that lead to their formation have remained elusive. Traditionally found in quartz veins deep ...

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 ...

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 ...

The team wondered if this effect could be causing gold to clump together into nuggets, with the mechanical stress coming from earthquakes. To test the idea, the researchers submerged quartz ...

Gold naturally forms in quartz — the second-most abundant mineral in Earth's crust after feldspar. But unlike other types of gold deposits, those found in quartz often cluster into giant nuggets ...

The largest gold nuggets are often found in places where fluids flow through faults in rock during earthquakes. This creates veins of quartz that can contain gold. It takes hundreds or thousands ...

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 ...