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• More than 90 percent of all gold ever used has been mined since 1848, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California, sparking the greatest gold rush of all time.
• All the gold that has ever been refined throughout history could be placed in a cube measuring 65.5 feet per side.
• Gold nuggets (aka placer gold) are solid lumps of gold. Nuggets are rare, making up less than 2 percent of all native gold ever mined.
• It has been estimated that, worldwide, the total amount of gold ever mined is 152,000 metric tons, only enough to fill 60 tractor trailers.
• One ounce of gold can be stretched into a thin wire measuring only five microns, or five millionths of a meter. That would reach in a straight line a distance of 50 miles.
• Gold is so malleable that a single ounce of it (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin continuous sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field.
Courtesy of The American Museum Of Natural History
www.amnh.org/
