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Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisanal and small-scale mining employs millions and is the largest source of anthropogenic mercury emissions. · Mercury amalgamation persists because it is cheap, fast and requires no capi…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

…t tonnage, is what makes an ore economic — and e-waste is extraordinarily concentrated by mining standards. · The bottleneck is collection and logistics, not metallurgy; the chemistry has been solved for decades. · Informal backyard recovery captures a fraction of the gold while…

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

…for turning grade into cash flow at an acceptable cost per tonne. To understand why gold mining behaves as it does through a price cycle, you have to understand the arithmetic that sits underneath the machinery. · Grams per tonne, and what that means physically · Gold grade is q…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…virus. · Gold nanoparticles are red because collective electron oscillations — surface plasmons — absorb green light at around 520 nanometres. · The colour is size-dependent and aggregation-sensitive, which is what makes the particles usable as a readout rather than just a pigme…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…ontinue for centuries, which makes it the single largest long-term liability in hard-rock mining. · Why do tailings dams fail? Most failures trace to construction method, water management or foundation conditions rather than to a single dramatic event. Upstream-raised dams, built…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…· Present our reporting in a way that suggests we endorse a product, an issuer, a fund, a mining venture or a trading service. · Interfere with the security of the site, attempt to gain unauthorised access to any system, or introduce malicious code. · 4. Intellectual property · A…

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…. · A 'rich' deposit is still roughly one part gold to a million parts rock, which is why mining is an exercise in moving overburden rather than collecting treasure. · Is it true that all gold comes from exploding stars? Broadly, yes — but not from ordinary supernovae alone. Gold…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…two explanations that dominate popular commentary, inflation fear and speculative enthusiasm, neither of which describes how a reserve manager actually thinks. · What a reserve portfolio is for · A central bank's foreign reserves are not an investment fund. Their purpose is to l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…nother currency bears an exchange-rate exposure that can dominate the metal's own move. · Mining equities are not bullion: producers carry operational, geological, labour, permitting, expropriation, tax and hedging risk. A producer's shares can fall in a rising gold market and ha…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…material so that there is as little to disclose as possible. Whistleblowers in refining, mining and bullion banking are encouraged to make contact through channels they control, from equipment that is not their employer's. · Practically, that means we keep contact records apart…

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

For half a century it was rational to store your gold in someone else's basement. Then the calculus of counterparty risk changed, and reserve managers started chartering aircraft. · Overseas custody w…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

A hallmark is one of the oldest consumer protection technologies in continuous use. It is also, on close inspection, a small masterpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A h…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

Counterfeiting gold is not about making something that looks right. It is about defeating a specific test, and the industry's defences are an escalating conversation between forgers and instruments. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

Between the vault and the buyer sits an industry of armoured vehicles, sealed cargo, bonded warehouses and insurance clauses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can dive…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the metal i…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

Gold's working properties are so extreme they border on the absurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. ·…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

Industrial demand is the quietest third of the gold market: a few tenths of a gram per handset, multiplied by billions of devices, chosen not for prestige but because nothing else conducts as reliably…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

Pure gold is too soft to hold a stone, too soft to hold an edge, and the wrong colour for half the world's taste. Almost everything you own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where t…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

Roughly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most selle…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewell…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…itorial desk. · This policy applies only to this website. Where an article links out to a mining company filing, a central bank statistical release, an exchange rulebook or a third-party research paper, that destination is governed by its own privacy practices, which we neither c…