We bet there’s a lot you don’t know about gold. Here are four facts that help tell gold’s story. Did you know:
- If you took all the gold that’s ever been mined out of the ground, more than 90-percent of it was extracted after the Gold Rush of 1848. The discovery of gold in California didn’t just mark the beginning of the largest gold rush in history. It also sparked a flourishing of new technologies and methods for finding and locating gold. This has made us far better at mining gold from the ground. Roaring Camp Mining Co. even maintains a working gold mine that you can see in operation!
- How common is gold? Only one out of every one billion atoms in the Earth’s crust is a gold atom. Luckily, gold often tends to accumulate in larger deposits. This only happens as a result of very specific geological activity. All that specificity means that we’re familiar with the regions that tend to have more gold than others – areas near tectonic activity and mountains that were once (or sometimes still are!) volcanoes.
- Nonetheless, there is one environment where gold is even more common. The ocean is estimated to contain eight times the gold we can mine on land. Unfortunately, technology hasn’t quite caught up and much of the gold is scattered and very deep. This means that the cost of mining gold on the ocean floor would far outweigh the worth of the amount mined.
- Although 78-percent of the gold mined annually in the world is turned into jewelry, another 12-percent goes into our electronics. Gold is an excellent conductor that is easy to shape yet difficult to corrode. You’ve got gold in your phones, computers, and televisions. Just don’t go tearing these apart – the amount you’d get from them costs far less than the device itself. The last 10-percent of gold is used in finance.We’re happy to teach you these and more facts about gold at Roaring Camp Mining Co. In fact, we have a gold mining museum and we run gold panning tours where you and your family can learn techniques for panning for gold in California. You even get to keep any you find, and many visitors have gone home a bit richer!