Are there just blobs of gold and quartz floating around in the magma?
Edit: I’m taking an online geology class, so I can’t raise my hand as easily to ask questions. I appreciate your answers. It helps me greatly!!
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Metal doesn’t form deep in the earth. Any element heavier than iron was formed in a supernova event. It collects deep in the earth because it’s heavy and over the course of billions of years it collects in deep places. Crystals like quartz and most rocks are formed by magma cooling down.
All of earths elements were formed in the core of a sun billions of years ago. That sun exploded in a super nova and from its “dust” our solar system was formed.
Gold and quartz are often associated with each other. They are can be formed when superwater hot water underground permeates through existing matter (both dissolve in the water to a small extent). As the water rises it cools and both the gold and quartz precipitate out as solids though not necessarily at the same time or place). So if you like they are extracted by the water from rocks much like coffee from beans.
Note there are other ways of getting quartz and gold .
Gold ions are found in dilute concentration in both seawater and the magma. Seawater slowly seeps through fractures in rock and ends up underneath land. Sometimes seawater gets into magma, like at plate boundaries where ocean crust subducts beneath the land, and takes some water down with it, like the Andes. The incredible heat and pressure of the magma makes the now superheated magmatic water really, really want to escape. When it finds a crack in the crust it starts flowing up into it. The seawater underneath the land also gets heated up by the magma underneath it and gets driven upwards by sort of the same idea. But the crust is a lot cooler, and in the process the gold-laden water cools down too. The colder it gets, the less gold it’s able to hold onto, so it starts dropping gold atoms all over its subterranean path until it slowly builds up into a layer.
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