Did You Know?

All the gold ever produced would fit into a cube of 18 meters per side.

Thirty-one grams (about one ounce) of gold can be fashioned into a wire more than 75 kilometers long or beaten into a sheet over 9 meters square.

All seawater contains gold in solution, on average, about one grain of gold (.0648 grams), worth 5 cents, to approximately one metric ton of water.

Dore' bullion bars containing approximately 94 percent gold and 5 percent silver. FMC Corporation.

A gold coating 10-millionths of a centimeter thick can protect astronauts from the heat of the spaceship's engines.

Nevada leads the U.S. in gold production.

A cubic meter of gold weighs more than 14 metric tons.

Gold nugget.

Depending on the ore, as many as 13 metric tons of rock need to be extracted and processed to yield 25 grams of pure gold.

The heaviest gold nuggets ever found was discovered in Australia and weighed over 90 kilograms.

Jeremy M. Brodie
Environmental Education and Volunteer Programs
Last Updated: May 1, 1996