(water rushing)
- And...
That could be something.
(twangy guitar music)
Today, I'm on a very amateur hunt
for a very unique material.
Gold.
It's one of humanity's oldest treasures
but it keeps reinventing itself with the times.
It's been a status symbol, a currency, a garnish,
a future material, and a lot more.
It came from outer space
and ends up locked away in vaults.
It lasts forever.
I've always thought about gold
as this rarest of rare treasures,
but I also found out recently
that it's apparently not that hard to find around here,
which completely messes with my whole idea
of what gold's about.
So welcome to my latest obsession.
I'm gonna try to understand what makes gold so valuable
and find out whether it's actually all that rare.
I think I might have something.
(water rushing) (twangy guitar music)
It is tiny.
(subdued water rushing)
So if I wanna find some golden myself,
I need to understand the journey that it goes on.
A lot of wild stuff happened to get gold here to Earth.
Cosmic explosions that chucked metals like gold
out into the universe.
A massive shower of metal-rich meteors
that may have pounded the early Earth.
It's all surprisingly controversial.
What we know is that there's currently gold peppered
throughout the Earth's crust and mantle.
It collects in areas called veins.
Basically, super hot water dissolves gold deep underground,
brings it closer to the surface,
and drops it in veins as the water cools.
If a vein surfaces via erosion,
the gold is weathered away into little bits
and carried downstream by rivers.
This is known as placer gold,
and it's what we're after.
The key to finding placer gold is its density.
Gold is about 19 times denser than water,
meaning only quickly-flowing water can carry it.
So you can expect to find gold wherever a river slows down,
like here, along an inside bend,
or here, where water deflects around a big rock.
In either case, the current eases up,
and the gold drops to the river bed.
Which river to look in, that part's anyone's guess.
Gold has been found all over the mountains
here in Washington,
but with the help of a local amateur miner,
I got a tip.
And just pass the bridge, there's a turnoff to a park?
Okay, good enough for me.
So let's talk about why humans want gold so desperately.
According to the Gold Council, which is a trade group,
its biggest single use historically is jewelry.
It accounts for almost half of all gold ever mined.
That's about 93,000 metric tons.
Then there are the industrial or practical uses for gold.
Gold's great for dentists
because it can be shaped into long-lasting fillings.
It's also used as a conductor in electronics.
There's an arthritis medicine made of gold.
There are coronavirus tests that use gold.
It really runs the gamut.
So what's up with that last 35, 40%?
Right now, there's about 75,000 tons of gold
that's just being used as a thing that has value.
It's formed into bars or coins
and accumulated by governments and banks and investors.
It's not being used for anything practical,
but it holds value,
largely because we all just agree that it does.
Out in the field, it's time to put my research to the test.
Hey, buddy.
- [Alex] Good morning.
- Ready to go get some gold?
- [Alex] Yes.
(water rushing)
- Okay.
The whole river is kinda arcing widely this way.
So we're on the inside bank, which is a good thing.
I think we just start digging and see what happens.
Now, ideally, we want to get as close
to the bedrock layer as possible.
As the gold moves through here,
it sifts down through all this later material
until it hits that bedrock layer.
So for us, that either means finding exposed bedrock
or it means digging.
(subdued mellow guitar music)
We filter out the biggest stuff.
Okay.
(subdued mellow guitar music)
So what I'm doing here just to start
is getting all of this gunk suspended in a layer of water
so that I can start to filter out the lightest stuff,
the really light stuff is gonna be the stuff
that kind of dissolves in the water.
And then I can start to let the lightest rocks tip off.
And the heavier stuff will sink to the bottom of the pan
so that eventually all that's left is the heaviest stuff.
That's gonna be some black sand.
It's made of different kinds of irons.
And then it's gonna be gold.
The point of this last step is to get it as spread out
as possible across the bottom of the pan,
so even the tiniest little flake will show up.
(water rushing)
Nope.
(disappointed vocalizing)
Clean plate club.
Back to it.
This process is fun, but it does not capture the scale
and stakes of the modern gold industry.
Most gold comes from hard rock mining.
That means digging up and processing the veins of gold
while they're still in the earth.
It's difficult and dangerous work.
And it's too easy to do poorly.
The chemicals used, like cyanide and mercury,
can leak and pollute groundwater.
Mining can scar the land for years to come.
Butte, Montana sits next to a former mine
that's now a massive toxic lake.
The area is one of the largest Superfund sites
in the nation.
What's more, the demand for gold drives millions of people
around the world to engage in smaller scale,
often unregulated mining.
This exposes countless workers to mercury poisoning,
many of them children.
Accidents and other dangers abound.
Overall, it's an industry with a reputation
for crushing work and very long odds.
(water rushing)
Late in the afternoon, a possible breakthrough.
I'm looking for any little sparkle.
Wait, wait, what's that?
Our little sparkly guy there, you see it?
- [Alex] Oh, now I see it.
- That's about the size we're likely to find.
I don't know.
I can't even tell what I'm looking at.
It might not be.
That is gold mining in a nutshell.
After a day of digging and sifting,
hundreds of pounds of earth moved,
we've got this one tiny little fleck of maybe gold.
Got it.
Which gets at the other side of why gold is so valuable.
It's not rare per se,
but it's hugely difficult to mine at any real volume.
For every ton of rock processed at an average deposit,
you can expect about 3/100 of an ounce of gold.
That works out to about one part per million.
So the gold supply is often more about economics
than geology.
Mining companies today have a lot
of what they call gold resources.
It's gold they've got earmarked, but are avoiding for now
because mining it will literally cost more than it's worth.
And that's what gold scarcity really means.
We know where it is and how to get it.
It's just costly in every sense of the word.
(contemplative guitar music)
There are ongoing efforts to improve gold mining.
Campaigns like No Dirty Gold fight
for better labor standards, environmental protections,
and oversight.
International mining agreements have come online
as have stronger guidelines within mining companies.
And, in theory, there are more exotic ways
to feed our gold habit.
There are gold deposits across the sea floor
and some early efforts to mine them.
Or there's outer space.
Asteroids in our own solar system contain troves
of precious metals if we can get at them.
But, again, gold isn't valuable unless you can sell it
for more than it costs to get it.
For now, that math says
to just dig some more holes in the ground.
After tearing up half a riverbank,
I kept thinking about the why of the gold industry.
Most gold is dug up for beauty, for status,
or just for abstract value.
It's basically mined for the sake of a metaphor.
And it's a metaphor we clearly still believe in.
With the onset of the pandemic,
gold shot up in value,
like it often does when times are uncertain.
That's us betting against the modern economy,
against our governments,
and our leaders and our future.
It's a vote for this thing
that we all like that never changes.
That'll be around long after we're gone.
(contemplative violin music)
The next morning was 38 degrees and hailing.
We were cold and wet,
but the campsite was right next to the river.
So we took one last crack at panning.
(contemplative violin music)
Wait, wait, wait.
That is a little piece of gold.
That's fricking ridiculous.
Yeah.
We got some gold.
We found gold in a hailstorm.
And, sorry, I gotta do it.
Eureka.
(subdued contemplative violin music)