{"id":25923,"date":"2026-01-22T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=25923"},"modified":"2026-01-22T04:57:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T09:57:13","slug":"the-gold-in-your-ring-may-have-started-moving-80-km-underground-and-a-new-study-reveals-the-chemical-trick-that-releases-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/the-gold-in-your-ring-may-have-started-moving-80-km-underground-and-a-new-study-reveals-the-chemical-trick-that-releases-it\/25923\/","title":{"rendered":"The gold in your ring may have started moving 80 km underground, and a new study reveals the chemical \u201ctrick\u201d that releases it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of us have seen gold in a wedding ring, a coin, or the tiny connectors inside a phone, but few people stop to ask how that metal ever reached the surface. So how did it get there in the first place? Deep inside our planet, gold is far more common than in the rocks miners<\/a> actually dig, which has puzzled scientists for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An international team led by Deng-Yang He at China University of Geosciences in Beijing<\/a>, working with Adam Simon<\/a> at the University of Michigan<\/a> and colleagues in Switzerland, Australia, and France, now thinks it has an answer. Their new study points to a special gold-sulfur combo that forms far beneath volcanoes and turns hidden metal into rich deposits that companies can mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold is common inside Earth but scarce where we can reach it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Gold is surprisingly abundant when you consider the whole Earth, yet most of it is locked away in the deep mantle<\/a>. Near the surface, it shows up in narrow veins and scattered clusters that prospectors chase from one mountain range to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mantle is the thick rocky layer beneath the crust, hotter than any home oven yet still mostly solid. In certain places, part of this mantle melts into magma and carries bits of metal upward, and for years geologists argued over how enough gold could hitch a ride in that molten rock to create a useful deposit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read More: A new study suggests that human women and Neanderthal men interbred much more frequently than previously thought, which rewrites part of the history of our origins<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A gold-sulfur complex becomes a fast track to the surface<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The new research focuses on mantle rocks roughly 50 to 80 kilometers below active volcanoes, where pressure and temperature are extreme and some rock has melted into magma<\/a>. Pure gold does not react much in this environment, yet when sulfur-rich fluids arrive from the sinking tectonic plate, the metal bonds with three sulfur ions to form a mobile gold-trisulfur complex that dissolves easily in the melt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To test this idea, the team created artificial magma in the lab and carefully controlled temperature and pressure, then used those results to build a numerical thermodynamic model<\/a> on a computer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier work had hinted that sulfur radicals help move gold in hot fluids closer to the surface, and a 2015 study<\/a> showed that some sulfur ions can carry high amounts of gold in solution, so this new model pushes that chemistry deeper and connects it to giant deposits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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