Embedded Files
Note that these two videos begin with the same section, but lead to different conclusions.
Gold
Gold
Gold and Iron
Gold and Iron
Part 1: Overview
Part 1: Overview
Science of Minecraft gold full.mp4Part 1: Transcript
Part 1: Transcript
Sarah: This is a very popular one, so we've got gold, and if I switch over real quick, I just wanted to show in Minecraft, we can find this gold ore, and if I stick it in a furnace like this one, and I give it a moment, it will eventually give me a gold ingot.
Kim: Very nice. So yeah that's very true of how the rocks form here on Earth. If you take a ton of material from a gold mine, you might only get a couple of ounces of gold out, so if you look, that's the rock wall that we have at the museum, and I actually went to that mine and drove around with the mining engineer, and we found some really, really gold rich ore, but if you sit there and look at every bit, it's five tons of material, so that is a lot of material on that poor wall. We had to reinforce the wall a little bit to make sure it didn't fall through to the Canadiana Gallery below. But if you look at that, those rocks, you won't even see gold, because it's so, so tiny compared to the other rock that is formed there, but that's pretty much how it works is that you have to grind up the rock, heat it up, and extract the gold out of the specimen.
Sarah: So on the slide that we can see on our screen, there's a green circle around this little, kind of, white panel in the middle of the wall, and it's hard to see because this is taken from so far away, but do you want to talk about what's in that little white square?
Kim: So when we do get back to the museum, I hope everybody gets a chance to look at that wall. So in that little box is a piece of gold ore, and that is the amount of gold that would be extracted from all those rocks on the wall. So that is, sort of, the visual representation of all the material, what you actually get out at the end.
Sarah: So if Minecraft was like real life, I'd have to put, like, a hundred of these blocks into the furnace to get a gold ingot out of it.
Kim: Yeah, unfortunately, but it looks like your your gold block is quite rich, so that's good. But gold has some of the most interesting properties of all the metals that we have. It would be used for wiring if it wasn't so expensive, so we can't, we could make all of our wiring and our walls out of gold, but it just costs so much, and there's talks about, you know prices, of gold.
Gold is used a lot for currency, for making ingots like you mentioned in Minecraft, and so gold, unfortunately, has a lot of value to it. That's what we make jewelry out of, because again, it's very easy, it's malleable, it's very easy to -- we talked about the squishy properties, but yeah, it's used for a lot of purposes for us externally, but yeah, it could be used for us internally, and for plants internally as well. It's, I think, a lot of elements in our atmosphere, and in our soils are really important to all of us.
Sarah: The other question they had is why does the price of gold go up and down?
Kim: It's a very complicated question that I don't have a lot of time for, but yeah, because it's used as currency, so we use it not only for jewelry and so, for adornment, so, looking at, you know, people have gold rings and necklaces and earrings, it's a very prized metal, it's very hard to find, as we talked, about even in gold mines where it's concentrated, we can only get a couple ounces per ton of rock, so it's very hard to get out of our surface of our planet, and then when we do get it, out some people like to hold on to it because it's so precious and so rare. As times, you know, currencies in governments can fluctuate up and down, we can watch how the US dollar compares to ours, and it's up and down, up and down, but gold's always going to be important, and really rare, so people sometimes like to put it in their piggy banks for a long time.
Part 2: Uses of Gold
Part 2: Uses of Gold
Science of Minecraft gold uses.mp4Part 2 Transcript:
Part 2 Transcript:
Sarah: We have another new section this used to be a wall you couldn't pass by, but now we can go through, and we're gonna head toward the river. And we have our friend Sam down here who gives us a bit of a hint about what we're looking for because, we can go into this chest and we can get one of these pans, and if we look in the river, we can see some stuff. So Kim, what do you think I should do with this pan that Sam has given us?
Kim: Hmm. Maybe you should scoop up some of that yellow material that's in the water. All right, I can see the arrow pointing to it so that's a good clue. So let's give that a try, and look at that we have gotten some gold with this pan. All right. So why do we care so much about gold?
Sarah: Well, gold is such an interesting metal. It is used a lot for jewelry. It's used as a currency. It's used in so many different ways. It is a beautiful colour, obviously, you can see it in the pictures there, but what's exciting about gold is it has a lot of interesting physical properties. It conducts electricity, I don't know if you knew that, but this one here specifically is a really nice looking one. It's very rounded and it doesn't have a lot of other stuff with it, so that would be a gold nugget. Gold nuggets are found in water, so just like Sam did there, and these are transported from their original deposits. The water, or wind, or a lot of the different processes that we have on Earth would break down some of the white material around it, or the quartz. So you can see even in the picture with the nugget there's little pieces of quartz, and this one's even a better picture, you see all that white material around it is the quartz, and they usually form together in in veins and then eventually the quartz breaks down and the gold is so tough and strong that it likes to stay all together, and this one is rounded just because it's been tossed and tumbled through water, and then as the water slows down, it can't carry this material anymore, and it's quite dense so it'll sink to the bottom.
I noticed that Sam had a comment about how how it bends, it's very malleable, meaning that you can shape it really nicely. You can actually shape it so thin that you can use it on the outside of buildings to make them look gold on the outside, but the material is actually very, very, very thin which is interesting. Gold is just such a interesting material that I could probably go on, and on, and on.
Sarah: Well sometimes when I see pictures of astronauts in their helmets in space it looks like their face shield is gold. Is that actual gold?
Kim: That is actual gold in their face shield, yep, so you can make it so thin that you actually can see through it, if you can believe it.
Sarah: That is really cool. Now, why would someone want to have a face shield made out of gold? Why is that? Is it just for them to look fancy, or is there an actual science reason for it?
Kim: They would look fancy, so that is certainly one of the ways, but, no, it's used mostly for radiation protection, so it actually can protect the astronauts' eyes and be able to see a little bit better while they're in space when you have that big bright sun. There's no clouds in space, so it's not going to protect them from space.
Sarah: So gold looks fancy and it protects you from radiation?
Kim: It is the coolest material out there, I swear. Because it's so soft, sometimes we mix it with other metals. So if you have a gold ring, for example, the gold is actually mixed or alloyed with another metal to make it just a little stronger so that it doesn't bend and break on your finger. That would be very sad, but you know we're very busy with our hands, and we wash dishes, and we're banging our jewelry around, and so you put a little bit of silver in it then it actually makes it a little stronger. So you'll see 14 karat gold, you'll see other things stamped into the gold, and that tells you what the percentage of gold to other metals is.
Sarah: That's really cool. We make alloys so that gold is stronger in rings and things for today, but because gold is so soft, is that why in movies with pirates you see them biting gold coins all the time?
Kim: Well, I wouldn't recommend you biting gold coins, but yes, if the purity of the gold is quite high, you could probably indent it with your with your teeth, so yeah, I think that would be a really good way. I would recommend other ways, but you know that would be one way, maybe on the seas if you had nothing else to check about the gold purity.
science of Minecraft gold and iron.mp4Transcript:
Transcript:
Sarah: This is a very popular one, so we've got gold, and if I switch over real quick, I just wanted to show in Minecraft, we can find this gold ore, and if I stick it in a furnace like this one, and I give it a moment, it will eventually give me a gold ingot.
Kim: Very nice. So yeah that's very true of how the rocks form here on Earth. If you take a ton of material from a gold mine, you might only get a couple of ounces of gold out, so if you look, that's the rock wall that we have at the museum, and I actually went to that mine and drove around with the mining engineer, and we found some really, really gold rich ore, but if you sit there and look at every bit, it's five tons of material, so that is a lot of material on that poor wall. We had to reinforce the wall a little bit to make sure it didn't fall through to the Canadiana Gallery below. But if you look at that, those rocks, you won't even see gold, because it's so, so tiny compared to the other rock that is formed there, but that's pretty much how it works is that you have to grind up the rock, heat it up, and extract the gold out of the specimen.
Sarah: So on the slide that we can see on our screen, there's a green circle around this little, kind of, white panel in the middle of the wall, and it's hard to see because this is taken from so far away, but do you want to talk about what's in that little white square?
Kim: So when we do get back to the museum, I hope everybody gets a chance to look at that wall. So in that little box is a piece of gold ore, and that is the amount of gold that would be extracted from all those rocks on the wall. So that is, sort of, the visual representation of all the material, what you actually get out at the end.
Sarah: So if Minecraft was like real life, I'd have to put, like, a hundred of these blocks into the furnace to get a gold ingot out of it.
Kim: Yeah, unfortunately, but it looks like your your gold block is quite rich, so that's good.
Sarah: And iron does the same thing. So if I go back in here, and I grab my iron, and I put it in the blast furnace, this iron is going to give me an iron ingot.
Kim: Yeah, no, that's true, too. So on the surface of our planet, we don't have a lot of free iron. What happens on big planets like Earth is all the iron sinks to the core, and so what we think is in the center of our planet is iron. It's a solid iron core, and you can see there in the picture is a big chunk of iron, and that's an iron meteorite. So this is from a planetesimal, a planet that doesn't exist anymore, that has been ripped apart, and that is probably from a piece of the core of that planet.
Sarah: Wow. Now it looks like there's a pattern in this iron.
Kim: so those are actually iron crystals, so that's what's forming in the center of this planet where actually iron had enough time to grow into little crystals, and if you cut it flat, and use some acid, you can actually etch out the crystal shapes and see them. It's called Widmanstätten pattern.
Sarah: So iron has crystals. Does that mean that gold has crystals, too?
Kim: Well, gold's a little different. I mean, it does have crystals, and we do see crystalline versions of it, which we have at the museum, and you can see it in the gallery, but gold likes to kind of fit in between other minerals, so you can see that white picture there, and I don't know which side it is on, so I don't really want to push it -- yeah that one, there, is all that quartz. So the gold sort of likes to fit around all the other grains there, but it can do crystallized as well.
Sarah: So we usually don't see gold crystals because gold is squishy?
Kim: It is squishy. It is a squishy mineral. It is. Makes it so fun.
See in ROM Collections Database
Collections Database Info
Collections Database Info
This extremely large gold nugget is one of the ROM’s most prized specimens. It weighs 2.06 kilograms and contains about 60 troy ounces of gold (the troy ounce is the traditional unit of weight for precious metals). The nugget was once a large piece of quartz vein rich in gold. It had been subjected to the pounding of pebbles and cobbles in rushing river waters, which powdered and washed away most of its brittle host quartz, leaving the gold, being malleable, to be pounded into this aesthetic shape. One can imagine the gold fever experienced by miners when nuggets of this size were found!
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