Australia, a country already blessed with endless sun,
beautiful landscapes and jaw-dropping wonders of nature, continues
to make other countries jealous as scientists announce that some of
their eucalyptus trees are literally leaking gold.
Melvyn Lintern and his team at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO) conducted the research that discovered trees in Australia
and throughout the world can be used to detect gold buried up to 30
metres underground. Small amounts of gold dissolve in the water
surrounding the trees, which is sucked up by the roots and
eventually stored in the leaves. This effectively provides an easy
way for gold miners to identify areas of land likely to contain
undiscovered mother lodes.
The amount of gold produced by the trees,
however, is miniscule -- Lintern estimates it would require 500
trees in order to make a simple gold ring. The gold produced is so
small that a synchotron, a room-sized type of cyclic particle
accelerator that uses x-rays to map various elements of a sample,
had to be used in order to get achieve a reading.
With approximately 30 percent of the world's gold
reserves are believed to be under the Goldfields-Esperance region in Australia, this is particularly
good news for Australian gold miners. Prior to this discovery, the
only way to extract gold was to mine the precious metal from
bedrock, where gold veins had naturally reached the surface.
Whilst it's possible to initiate some form of
underground exploration around potential gold sources, it's usually
considered too expensive and comes with too many risks. This new
method provides a more accurate and relatively cheap alternative
that can also be used to search for other valuable metals such as
copper and platinum.