gold

bozo the clown

How much gold is there on planet Earth, rough estimates in tonnes ?

marcus

I dont happen to know.
I guess I would look in google
"abundance of the elements"

your question could be interepreted two ways

A. how much gold is commercially available or could be mined
at a certain price

(this depends very much on the price, if the price goes up enough they will go back to worked-out mines and get more gold out of the rock that they would not get with the present price)

B. how much gold actually is there in the earth's crust, including deposits nobody would dream of mining, down to some depth

or how much gold is in the whole earth not even restricting it to the crust.

-----
I am curious which type of question-----the commerical one or the physical one----you mean. It will be interesting to see if anyone answers. did you try googling "abundances of elements" or something like that?

TALewis

This page claims that there are 100,000 tons of gold yet to be retrieved from the Earth:

http://www.mii.org/Minerals/photogold.html

Here is an old PF thread that came up on Google:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-2774