There’s gold in them thar hills—or, at least, in the volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands—along with other precious metals.
This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers who found evidence that metals are leaking from Earth’s core into the mantle, before being erupted at the surface.
“When the results first came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold,” said paper author and geochemist Nils Messling of Göttingen University, Germany, in a statement.
“Our data confirmed that material from the core—including gold and other precious metals—is leaking into Earth’s mantle above.”
According to the researchers, more than 99.999 percent of Earth’s total reserves of gold and other precious metals lie within our planet’s metallic core—buried beneath some 1,864 miles of rock.
In their study, Messling and colleagues found traces of one particular precious metal—ruthenium (Ru)—that their analysis indicates must have come from Earth’s core.
Compared with the mantle, the team explains, Earth’s core has a greater abundance of one particular ruthenium isotope: 100Ru.
The reason for this is that the ruthenium that ended up locked up in the core when it formed some 4.5 billion years ago (along with gold and other precious metals) came from a different source than the tiny amount of the element that can be found in the mantle today.
It had long been impossible to distinguish these differences in ruthenium isotope concentrations—until the advent of new methods, developed at Göttingen, which revealed unusually high 100Ru signals in the Hawaiian lavas.
Paper co-author and Göttingen geochemist professor Matthias Willbold said in a statement: “Our findings not only show that Earth’s core is not as isolated as previously assumed.
“We can now also prove that huge volumes of superheated mantle material—several hundreds of quadrillion metric tons of rock—originate at the core–mantle boundary and rise to Earth’s surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii.”
The findings, the researchers explain, mean that at least some of our valued but limited supplies of gold and other precious metals may have come from the Earth’s core.
“Whether these processes that we observe today have also been operating in the past remains to be proven,” Messling said.
He concluded: “Our findings open up an entirely new perspective on the evolution of the inner dynamics of our home planet.”
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Reference
Messling, N., Willbold, M., Kallas, L., Elliott, T., Fitton, J. G., Müller, T., & Geist, D. (2025). Ru and W isotope systematics in ocean island basalts reveals core leakage. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09003-0