A research team has discovered a new mechanism that helps explain how gold deposits are formed. The study found that a specific type of sulfur, under very specific conditions, causes gold to transfer from the Earth's mantle into magmas that eventually reach the surface.
A research team including a University of Michigan scientist has discovered a new mechanism that helps researchers understand how gold deposits are formed. Gold is a surprisingly common metal, but most is locked away deep within Earth's mantle. On the surface, it is concentrated in volcanic or magmatic rocks. But how that gold is brought to the surface has been a subject of debate.
Now, a research team has used numerical modeling to reveal the specific conditions that lead to the enrichment of gold-bearing magmas. A specific kind of sulfur existing under a very specific set of pressures and temperatures as found at a depth of 50 to 80 kilometers (or 30 to 50 miles) beneath active volcanoes causes gold to be transferred from the mantle into magmas that eventually move to the Earth's surface. Scientists have previously known that gold complexes with various sulfur ions, but this study, which includes researchers from China, Switzerland, Australia and France, is the first to present a robust thermodynamic model for the existence and importance of the gold-trisulfur complex. Pure gold is inert in Earth's mantle and tends to stay there. But when a fluid containing the trisulfur ion is added, gold strongly prefers to bond with trisulfur to form a gold-trisulfur complex. This complex is highly mobile in the molten sections of the mantle—the part that geologists call magma. The researchers developed the new thermodynamic model based on lab experiments in which the researchers control pressure and temperature of the experiment to create artificial magma. This thermodynamic model can then be applied to real-world conditions. Gold deposits are often found in subduction zones, which are regions where a tectonic plate is diving under another plate. In these seams where the plates meet each other, magma from Earth's mantle has the opportunity to rise to the surface
GOLD DEPOSITS GEOLOGY MAGMA THERMODYNAMICS SUBDUCTION ZONES
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