Fir trees can accumulate gold. That is what Finland has just demonstrated, that its fir trees, thanks to invisible microbes, can accumulate gold in their leaves and branches, and no, no one has watered them with anything strange, but these microbes are capable of transforming dissolved gold from the substrate into small nanoparticles that end up inside the needles of the trees.
It was the University of Oulu and the Geological Survey of Finland who signed this study and of course, there is already talk of a revolution in mining. Can you imagine not having to dig into the ground to find gold? Simply by looking in the fir trees it could be possible… Much cleaner mining, quieter and above all, much more respectful of the landscape.
A Christmas tale
We know, it sounds unreal, but everything began near the Tiira gold deposit, an area covered with many trees.
There, the team took 138 samples of red spruce needles from about 23 trees in total. And four of them had gold inside the leaves. But the most interesting part is where the gold was, because we might think it was stuck to the surface or coating the leaf, but no, it was inside the tissue, surrounded by small bacterial communities wrapped in biofilm. As if the microbes had set up a mini laboratory in there.
And it is those bacterial communities that have the ability to transport and transform the gold.
Who carries the gold to the fir trees?
The researchers identified several bacteria involved, Cutibacterium, Corynebacterium and a rather mysterious microorganism from the P3OB-42 group.
And what do they do exactly? You are probably asking yourself. Well, the gold is dissolved in the soil water, these bacteria transform it into small solid particles and the tree ends up accumulating those nanoparticles in the leaves.
The process is called biomineralization, and it is a kind of natural alchemy that the microbes carry out with total normality.
That said, before anyone gets excited, an entire tree accumulates gold worth… 0.02 cents. Nobody is going to get rich by planting fir trees, but…
How does that gold reach the leaves?
Plants can absorb metals from the soil, that was already known but no one was sure how solid particles could form inside a living organism, now they have managed to find out how the process works.
- The soil water drags along gold in tiny quantities.
- The microbes that live inside the tree (the famous endophytes) act as catalysts.
- The gold is transformed and gets trapped in the leaves.
From an economic point of view it is insignificant, but from a scientific point of view it is explosive.
A cross between disciplines
- Microbiology, to understand the role of the microbes.
- Geology, because everything starts underground.
- Ecology, to see how the tree interacts with its environment.
- Nanotechnology, because we are talking about tiny particles.
The result is a totally new approach to studying minerals without drilling the ground.
What does this mean for mining?
It would be as easy as knowing under which tree there is gold, because each tree would reveal what lies beneath it and we could talk about “natural sensors”. That way, there would be no need to drill wildly in all natural spaces, nor use heavy machinery that damages the ecosystem, reducing environmental impact. Something like a perfect application of green mining.
Paradigm shift
If this technique is perfected, it could replace invasive methods and reduce prospecting costs. Perhaps in a few years the first clue to a deposit will not be a giant pit, but a forest full of trees that, without knowing it, carry gold in their leaves!
Gold in fir trees, as if they were Christmas trees. Nature never stops surprising us, don’t you think?!