Transient Treasures: Scientists Unearth Gold’s Remarkable Origin Story

By Jim Shelton

New research offers a theory on how gold, platinum, and other precious metals found their way to shallow pockets within Earth’s mantle.

Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) say they’ve hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold.

It’s a story that begins with violent collisions of large objects in space, continues in a half-melted region of Earth’s mantle, and ends with precious metals finding an unlikely resting spot much closer to the planet’s surface than scientists would have predicted.