Gold growing on trees offers a new prospecting tool

The old saying “money doesn’t grow on trees” is often recited to mind squandering youth of the value of a hard earned buck. Things turn really funny when you hear that gold, as in the actual glittering chemical element that money is used to be based on, grows on trees. In Australia, to be more precise, geochemists at  CSIRO’s Earth Science and Resource Engineering division in Kensington found that trees that grew on gold deposits had a concentration of gold particles at the surface of their leaves 40 times higher than trees that grew on normal soil.
The tree studied by the researchers led by Mel Lintern,  a geochemist with the  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia’s national science agency) is a certain Eucalyptus tree which grew above a known gold deposit. The deposit is about the size of a football field and lies at least 30 meters below ground – too little for too much of an effort to be worth the exploitation. What scientists have learned after gathering twigs, bark and a myriad of trees however may be of greater value. Imagine prospecting operations that are both cheap and non-invasive: as easy as putting a leaf under a microscope.