Earthquake-induced electricity offers answer to mystery of gold nugget formation

The pressure created by earthquakes could trigger quartz veins to generate enough electricity to form large nuggets of gold, researchers in Australia have found.

Most gold nuggets originate in quartz veins when gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids from the earth’s crust are transported along fracture networks by earthquakes. ‘[Quartz veins] form over the accumulation of thousands of earthquake events,’ says Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and lead researcher on the study. ‘There’s a fault that turns into a quartz vein and then it’ll fracture open repeatedly during many, many earthquakes… And every time it fractures open, a gold-bearing fluid from deep in the crust flows through it.’