Scientists have discovered exactly how earthquakes trigger quartz into forming large gold nuggets — finally solving a mystery that's puzzled researchers for decades. "Gold forms in quartz all the time ...

Christopher Voisey receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia. Humanity’s fascination with gold stretches back thousands of years.

Gold has always been a hot commodity. 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 ...

We can't usually feel them, but dozens of earthquakes occur every day—and some of them are using mundane minerals to make glittering gold. Researchers have found that tectonic shifts put just the ...

When strained by earthquakes, underground networks of quartz veins can generate enough voltage to snatch gold from passing fluids, researchers report September 2 in Nature Geoscience. The findings ...

For decades, researchers have known that earthquakes, quartz, and gold were linked—nearly 75% of gold circulating today came from nuggets originally embedded in quartz deposits near faults. But in ...