Gold is one of the most valuable metals on Earth. And for good reason: gold deposits are difficult to find! However, if we consider all of the earth’s envelopes, gold is not such a rare mineral. However, its distribution is not uniform. It is in fact concentrated in the Earth’s mantle, from where it is extracted by magmatic processes which will allow it to reach the surface of the Earth. crustcrust. Deposits are thus found mainly in igneous rocks, from which gold can be extracted.
However, the way in which this mineral is transported from the mantle to the surface is still very poorly understood. Gold is indeed a metalmetal inert which does not tend to react with its environment. A characteristic which means that it would tend to remain in the mantle rather than integrating the magma rising towards the surface. However, a team of researchers has just proposed a new model that would solve this problem.
The importance of sulfur for the formation of gold deposits
THE modelingmodeling thermodynamicsthermodynamics carried out by researchers at the University of Michigan suggest that, if a fluid rich in trisulfur is injected into the mantle via THE tectonic platestectonic plates entering subduction, the gold present in the mantle would tend to preferentially associate with this moleculemolecule to form a gold-trisulfur complex, then becoming particularly mobilemobile.
Although proposed by previous studies, the existence of this complex was until now debated. This is the first time that it has been supported by a robust model, presented in the journal PNAS. Thanks to this bond with trisulfur, gold can be incorporated more easily into magmasmagmas which form within the mantle at the level of subduction zones and thus be transported towards the surface where it will form the gold deposits so sought after by thespeciesspecies human.
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