Money doesn't grow on trees - or does it?

A recent paper published in nature communications has given evidence that Eucalyptus trees may be capable of absorbing deposits of gold from within the earth. At a time when new gold discoveries have fallen dramatically, could this be an answer to finding them?

New discoveries of gold have fallen by 45% in the last 10 years. A large amount of gold may be found deeper within the earth beneath sediments, but locating these deposits has proven incredibly difficult. One new technique that is currently in development is called biogeochemistry, which is essentially the use of biological systems (for example plants) to determine which minerals are present in the soil they grow in, through observing the concentrations of minerals which can be found in the plants themselves.

However, there are a number of problems with using this type of data, chief amongst which is the fact that gold concentrations within plants is usually incredibly low, with no unequivocal evidence suggesting that the concentration of gold in plants has any correlation to the amount of gold in the soil in which they grow. It was therefore the aim of this research to provide more solid evidence for this theory.

To do this, researchers observed the activity of Eucalyptus trees which were known to be growing above a gold deposit, buried beneath a thick layer of other sedimentary minerals.

Whilst it has previously been shown that gold particles are present around the soil of Eucalyptus trees, this research, with the use of the Australian synchrotron (a machine which uses X-rays to view matter in vivid detail) was able to provide evidence for the presence of tiny amounts of gold in the leaves, twigs and bark too, proving that the trees were actually absorbing this material through their roots buried deep beneath the earth.

This could be an important discovery in the mining of precious minerals, and even those that aren’t so precious. Normally, to find a deposit of ore, extensive exploratory mining would have to take place which would usually result in a dead end. This is both expensive and invasive to the environment that sits on top of the ore. However, if this new method of detection could be developed more extensively, all that would be required to locate what we were looking for would be a sample of leaves or twigs from the vegetation in the area. These samples would then be able to tell us exactly what was within the soil, and whether more extensive mining should take place.

What do you think about this new discovery? Can you imagine being able to pop into your back garden one day and being able to tell exactly what was in the soil by looking at just one leaf?

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