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Natural Piezoelectric Effect May Build Gold Deposits

How does an unreactive, barely soluble metal end up forming giant chunks?

Those of you paying careful attention to the previous paragraph may have noticed a problem here: If gold is so difficult to get into its pure form, how do natural processes create enormous chunks of it? These areas are often filled with hot hydrothermal fluids, and the heat can increase the solubility of gold from "barely there" to "extremely low," meaning generally less than a single milligram in a liter of water. While you don't need to understand why that's the case to follow this hypothesis, the researchers' explanation of the piezoelectric effect is remarkably cogent and clear, so I'll just quote it here for people who want to come away from this having learned something: "Quartz is the only common mineral that forms crystals lacking a center of symmetry (non-centrosymmetric).

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