Christopher Voisey receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia. Humanity’s fascination with gold stretches back thousands of years.

Geologists have known for decades that gold forms in quartz with the help of earthquakes, but now they have worked out exactly how the setting and seismic waves combine to form large nuggets. When you ...

Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky: Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large ...