Some facts about gold (5 photos)

Some facts about gold are so amazing and unbelievable that they are really hard to believe. Especially if you visualize everything that will be discussed. So, I will try to surprise you today.





It is common knowledge that gold is a very heavy metal. It is almost three times heavier than iron. The density of gold is 19.32 g/ cm3, and the density of iron is "only" 7.874 g/ cm3. "Well, I surprised you!" - the reader will smile. Good. I'm starting to surprise. A tiny gold cube with a side of 3.7 cm weighs 1 kg.

But 3.7 cm is only the width of a standard matchbox!



Still not surprised? Then here is an even more illustrative example. A gold cube with a side of 37 centimeters weighs one ton!

This small gold cube, the height of your cat, cannot be lifted or moved. One ton of gold! The gold market in Dubai. This gold market is the largest in the world. About 10 tons of gold jewelry are constantly sold in its three hundred stores! And if you imagine this incredible amount of gold in the form of these gold cubes, then it doesn't seem like much. Just ten cubes.





Throughout its history, mankind has mined about 200,000 tons of gold. 200 million kilograms! A colossal number! By the way, about 50% of all this gold went into jewelry.

Let's imagine that all this incredible amount of gold was collected in one place and melted down into one big cube (well, I like gold cubes today). All 200,000 tons. How big do you think this cube will be? Only 22 meters. Even a little less.

Like a seven-story building.



And this is what all the gold mined by mankind throughout its history would look like next to the Pyramid of Cheops.

If one gram of gold can be extracted from one ton of rock in a primary deposit, then this is a really good deposit! No, of course there are deposits where 2-3 grams, and even 10 grams are mined from one ton of ore. And in Africa there is the richest deposit Mponeng, where each ton of rock contains as much as 14 grams of gold!

But most often the gold content in the ore is much lower. It can be even half a gram, or even less.

How much does your wedding ring weigh? Four grams? Well, let's take away almost half for the ligature (if the sample of your ring is 583 or 585 - the most common sample here). Let's leave 2 grams of pure gold. Now imagine that in order to make your ring, it was necessary to process two tons of ore!

Probably everyone has heard that sea water contains a huge amount of gold. You can even find information that the entire World Ocean contains 8-10 billion tons! Simply an unimaginable amount: 10,000,000,000 tons! And this huge number often appears in various sources.

Then why is gold still not mined from sea water? But the thing is that in reality there is much less gold in the sea. The entire World Ocean contains only about 15 thousand tons of the precious metal.

Another interesting property of gold is its extraordinary plasticity. It is a well-known fact that a piece of this metal the size of a matchbox can be rolled into the thinnest foil the size of a tennis court. The fact itself is interesting, but it does not give an idea of ​​​​how thick this gold foil can be. Gold leaf, which is used to cover, among other things, the domes of churches, has a thickness of 0.1 microns.

Well, in general, for outdoor work, gold leaf is used a little thicker: 0.2 - 0.4 microns. When they talk about something very thin, they always compare it to a human hair. So, the thickness of a human hair is from 40 to 120 microns. It turns out that the thickest gold leaf is 100 times thinner than the thinnest human hair! Imagine how much this precious metal can be rolled out!

And one more comparison for the end. The erythrocytes in our blood, the very red blood cells that carry oxygen in the body, have a diameter of 7 microns, and a thickness of one micron in the center to two microns at the edges.