Plants are like sponges that take up materials thanks to their roots and incorporate them into their bodies. According to a study published in the journal Nature Communications and carried out by Australian scientists, checking the presence of gold in the leaves of certain plants, it is possible to know if a few meters below the surface there is a deposit of this precious metal.
Prior to this study, the possibility of plants absorbing certain elements and incorporating them into their biological tissue had already been observed. However, this is the first time that they have been able to test it in natural specimens, which opens a door to the development of new biogeochemical methods for soil exploration .
Eucalyptus is a perfect tree for this type of research, as it works as a kind of hydraulic pump, with deep roots that extend throughout the substrate. In addition, since gold is likely to be toxic to the plant, it tends to carry it to the branches and leaves, where it is easier to expel. And there it is easy to check its presence thanks to new technologies.
However, the fact that there are traces of gold does not mean that they are directly usable, nor that just digging a few meters the gold seekers can find their precious treasure. As Mel Lintern, a geochemist at the Commonwealth of Scientific and Industrial Research of Australia (CSIRO) and study co-author, explains, ” The blades can be used in combination with other tools to make exploration more cost-effective and environmentally friendly .” And it is that thanks to this technique, gold deposits could be found buried tens of meters underground covered with sediments of up to 60 million years.
But the search for gold is not the only utility that researchers have found in this study. As Lintern himself points out, “eucalyptus are so common that this technique could be used more commonly, it could even be used to find other metals such as zinc and copper .”
