Earthquakes Turn Water Into Gold

Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims. Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world's gold deposits, said Dion Weatherley, a geophysicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and lead author of the study. When an earthquake strikes, it moves along a rupture in th...