19 Things You Didn't Know About Gold, Including Where to Find More of It

1. Bullion is "safest."
If you’re buying gold to protect against an all-out financial meltdown, experts recommend buying bullion. The only catch? Gold bullion must be stored with agencies that have the right insurance and storage capabilities, and it’s unclear whether worried bullion investors would have access to the metals in the event of a crisis.

2. The "karat" was once a "carob."
The gold “karat,” which measures the purity of a gold piece, was originally a weight measurement equivalent to the heft of a carob seed. The unit originated with ancient merchants in the Middle East. Carob tree pods weigh about one-fifth of a gram.

3. It's practically Play-Doh.
How soft is gold? It’s malleable enough that a single ounce can be stretched into a 50-mile wire, or steamrolled flat into a single 100-square-foot sheet. 
 
4. It has mysterious healing powers.
For several decades, doctors have used intramuscular injections of a liquid gold suspension as treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. This method has fallen out of favor since the 1990s, however, and been replaced by remedies that produce fewer side effects. Still, gold is considered an effective remedy, though scientists have yet to identify the exact mechanism at work.

5. It's NOT the only metal that doesn't rust.
It’s often said that gold is the only metal that’s impervious to rust, but chromium and platinum share that distinction.

6. It's made in collapsing stars.
Like all pure elements, gold predates the sun and our planet. All of the Earth's gold was formed during supernova events. "Only in a supernova is it possible to create atoms with 30 protons, 40 protons, 50 protons or even 60 protons. Nature prefers even numbers for stability, but every so often, the star will forge an odd-numbered atom, a real rarity: gold!" says NPR's Robert Krulwich.

"After the explosion, those few gold atoms are cast deep into the universe where they sit in empty space for eons. Eventually, some of the atoms may join a cloud. That cloud may condense into a planet."  

7. North Carolina used to be the top gold state.
Gold was the first metal known to humans, identified in 6,000 BC. In the US, the first documented and significant discovery of gold occurred at the Reed Farm in Midland, North Carolina in 1799. (Smaller deposits of gold were found in Virginia before that.) North Carolina was America’s leading gold producer until 1848, when the California gold rush began.

8. Now Nevada is.
About 80% of gold mined in the US comes from Nevada, and the US is the fourth-largest gold-producing country in the world, behind South Africa, Australia, and China.

9. People are still eating it.
Some high-end restaurants are still using gold flakes in special menu items, even though the ingredient cost has spiked and gold has no flavor (it's biologically inert, which is why it's also been used by dentists). At the Manhattan restaurant Serendipity 3, for example, customers can order a Golden Opulence Sundae for $1,000, topped with edible gold flakes and served in a souvenir crystal goblet. According to the restaurant's spokesperson, to make each sundae the chef uses $50 to $100 worth of edible gold sheets, the price of which has doubled since the restaurant first started making the dessert six years ago. Fortunately the value of the crystal goblet has dropped, offsetting the costly yellow metal.

10. Gold's value used to hold steady.
We’ve known gold for its sudden rate spikes and nearly vertical price movement. A pure ounce in 2000 was $279; this year the price topped $1,500. The same is not true of the previous century. In 1800, an ounce of gold was $19; in 1930, the price had shot all the way up to $21.
 
11. These days, it's sifted not mined.
Most of the world’s gold supply comes from milling soil to find loose nuggets, pieces that broke off of larger deposits. In South Africa, the world’s leading gold producer, 70 million tons of earth are milled for an annual output of 500 tons of gold. National Geographic has reported that extracting a single ounce of gold—the amount in a typical wedding ring—requires the removal of more than 250 tons of rock and ore.

12. Which means that gold production is highly destructive and toxic.
Most of the gold left on the planet "is microscopic and is being wrung from the earth at enormous environmental cost, often in some of the poorest corners of the world," says the New York Times. Since most gold is used for jewelery, major jewelry companies, like Tiffany's (TIF), have begun to urge the refining industry to set environmental standards and reform.

And it's not just the extraction process that's damaging the earth. As Minyanville editor Kevin Depew reports in Gold Investors: This Is How Your Golden Sausage Is Made, “Once mined, gold must be separated from rock. To do this you'll likely need mercury. The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) estimates that one-third of all mercury released by humans into the environment comes from artisanal gold mining."  Artisanal miners account for about 25% of all gold mined in the world.

13. The rush to cash in on high gold prices is causing warfare, strife.
Around the world, the modern-day gold rush is leading to deadly violence. Colombia's leftist guerrillas are shifting to gold—away from cocaine—to fund their militias. (VIDEO: The New York Times on Columbia's illegal gold rush.) And the mad push has also sparked ongoing violence, police raids, murders and strife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Peru.
 
14. And more Americans are panning, too.
Gold fever has hit American enthusiasts, too. In Alaska, Nathan Williamson, operator of Crow Creek Mine, says that although he hasn’t seen an increase in bookings from afar (he blames the recent recession), he has seen a jump in the number of locals panning gold as a hobby.

“There’s a gentleman who has been coming five days a week for the past five or six weeks who is experienced and does it as a hobby," says Williamson. This man averages .5 ounces, or $750, per day. In a recent five-week period, he made roughly $3,000 to $4,000, less the daily fee he pays for access to the land.

However this man is the exception, cautions Williamson. "It takes years to be good at it and to know how to do it. These experienced people are not panning, but using special equipment, such as a sluice box.”

(Wondering where to look for gold? See this list of gold vacation destinations. For extra tips, and some tales of “big” small scale gold strikes, see Bedrock Dreams.)

15. Jewelery dominates demand.
According to the World Gold Council, about 70% of the world's gold output is used for making jewelry. The New York Times reports that figure to be closer to 80%. Only about 13% is used for coins, or stored by central banks or purchased by investors. The rest is bought out by industry for commercial use (see No. 13) or used for other purposes, such as dentistry.

16. Electronics companies are now “mining” discarded computers and printers.
Massive demand for tech products is one of the main reasons long-term annual consumption of gold is increasing. Gold, which has high thermal and electrical conductivity, is used to make complex circuitry. Because it doesn't rust and is not effected by environmental wear and tear, it's the metal of choice for high-end applications. The only metals that can conduct electricity better are silver and copper, but these tarnish and rust with time.

Now manufacturers are starting to recycle precious metals from discarded (customer-returned) electronics, reportedly recovering more than what might be found in a typical mining operation.

17. Marx considered it a fetish.
If you know Karl Marx's theories, you know that gold, as a representative of money, is what he considers a commodity fetish.
Here's how one Purdue scholar explains Marx's theory, quoting from original texts:
 

When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness." The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object.

In capitalist society, gold and then paper money become "the direct incarnation of all human labor," much as in primitive societies the totem becomes the direct incarnation of godhead.

18. There really isn't that much of it.
An amazing statistic: It's been said that all the gold ever produced would create a single cube only 66 feet on a side, or barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. And of all the gold that's been refined in history, 75% has been extracted since 1910.

19. The ocean is the last untapped gold mine.
Scientists have long known that hefty reserves of mineral deposits—gold, silver, zinc and copper, to name a few—are sitting one to two miles underwater, but until recently the demand and technology have not existed to extract the metals. Now companies are coming forward with the machinery to make ocean gold mining feasible. Needless to say, the development has alarmed environmentalists and marine scientists.