How To Use Trees To Prospect For Gold
Gold iStockphoto They say money doesn't grow on trees, but gold and other precious metals can accumulate in plants. Researchers recently discovered relatively high levels of gold in the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia, before uncovering a deposit of the metal more than 100 feet beneath it. “Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist. Perhaps surprisingly, it's been known for more than a century that plants may accumulate gold and other valuable metals. In 1900, an inventor from Brooklyn named Emil Lungwitz reported that plants can accumulate gold, The Scientist noted. But it never caught on as a prospecting method, in part...