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Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Modern open-pit gold ore is typically around one to two grams per tonne — roughly a gold ring's worth of metal in a truckload o…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is what makes an ore ec…

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…-evidenced site for it. · Almost all of the gold present when Earth formed sank into the core with the iron; the gold we mine arrived later, in a bombardment known as the late veneer. · Ore is not made by geology delivering gold to one place but by hot water dissolving trace gold…

Tomas Herrera · 18 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 sellers never see past the first counter. · Recycled metal typic…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…he risk lies in handling and storage, not in the chemistry being exotic. · Free cyanide degrades in sunlit water over weeks; the durable hazards at a closed mine are usually metals and acidity, not the reagent itself. · Acid mine drainage generates when sulphide minerals meet air…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…maining platinum-group elements and residual silver will not separate as chlorides. Electrorefining is required to go further. · The bar arriving on the loading dock does not look like money. It looks like a dirty brick: pitted, grey-gold, stamped with a mine code and a weight in…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…logy than with a stubborn set of physical facts about element 79, facts that were true before anybody was around to admire them and remain true now that most transactions are lines in a database. · Consider what a money must survive. It must pass through thousands of hands withou…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…ce volatility: gold is often described as a haven, yet it has repeatedly lost a third or more of its value in real terms over multi-year periods. A metal can be a long-run store of value and a poor short-run investment simultaneously. · No cash flow: bullion pays no coupon and no…

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…rth a few dollars at prevailing prices. · Gold is specified where a connection must not degrade: it does not form an insulating oxide, so contact resistance stays stable for decades. · Substitution is real and mostly already happened — copper bonding wire displaced gold across hi…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…t a cookie actually is · A cookie is a small text file that a site asks your browser to store and send back on subsequent requests. Related technologies — local storage, session storage and pixel requests — achieve similar ends by different means. This policy covers all of them,…

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…loy — and the design is where the engineering lives. · Karat is a fraction, not a quality grade: 24 parts by mass, so 18k is 75.0% gold and 9k is 37.5%. · Pure gold measures roughly 25 HV on the Vickers scale — softer than a fingernail can dent — which is why it is alloyed before…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…d where feasible eliminate mercury use in the sector. · The pit is four metres deep and shored with cut branches. Two men work at the bottom filling rice sacks with grey sediment; a third hauls them up on a rope. At the river's edge, a fourth swirls the contents of a shallow stee…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…old, where a client owns identified bars sitting outside the bank's balance sheet, costs more to hold precisely because it cannot be lent, netted or re-used. · Why this distinction matters to a reader, not just a trader Unallocated is a credit exposure to a bank; allocated is own…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…st, on why fire assay survives · XRF, and the honest limits of instant answers · X-ray fluorescence spectrometry is the workhorse of modern testing. Irradiate a sample, read the characteristic secondary X-rays each element emits, infer composition in seconds without damaging the…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…e, and that their smallness was the whole explanation. He was right, roughly a century before anyone could image the particles and confirm it. · That divided gold is now in more laboratories, hospitals and pharmacy shelves than bullion is in most vaults, and the reason is not sca…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…lary exists to negotiate between workability and durability. · Karat is a fraction, not a grade · The karat system divides by twenty-four. Twenty-four karat is pure gold; eighteen karat is eighteen parts gold in twenty-four, or 75 per cent by mass, stamped 750 in the millesimal s…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…automated means beyond what is permitted by our robots directives, or in a manner that degrades service for other readers. · Use our text, photography, charts or data to train, fine-tune or ground a machine learning model, or to build a derivative dataset, without a separate wri…

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 was a Cold War convenience: gol…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 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. · Jewellery is roughly half of annu…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…r the interior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence against core-filled bars, because sound travels through tungsten far faster than through gold. · For coins, precise dimensional gauging is unusually powerful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…oken custody record; once it leaves the accredited chain it must usually be re-refined before it can re-enter at full value. · Physical gold moves mostly as belly cargo on scheduled passenger flights, which ties bullion logistics to airline capacity. · Bar formats differ between…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…cord. · Legal frameworks that reward reporting — rather than punishing finders — recover more archaeology than prohibition does. · Why did people bury gold instead of storing it? In societies with no deposit banking, the ground was the safe. Burial is a rational storage technolog…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…ability. · Central banks are price-insensitive, slow buyers; their flow sets a floor far more often than it sets a headline. · Reported reserve figures are lagging, partly voluntary, and occasionally revised years later. · Why do central banks hold gold at all if it pays no inter…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…rior review over an article, and none is granted one. Copy is never shown to a subject before publication except where narrowly necessary to check a technical fact, and then only the specific passage in question, never the framing or the conclusions. · 3. Sourcing and verificatio…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…with data brokers. Where the tooling supports it, IP addresses are truncated or hashed before storage. · 2.3 Information you volunteer · If you write to the editorial desk — to file a correction, to offer a document, to pitch a story or to make a complaint — we receive whatever y…