Underground gold reserves are currently estimated at about 50,000 tons, according to the United States Geological Survey. The volume of gold reserves can be calculated more precisely than resources, although this is still not an easy task. According to the United States Geological Survey, underground gold reserves are currently estimated at about 50,000 tons. From this perspective, a total of around 190,000 tons of gold have been extracted, as mentioned above, although these figures vary.
With so much gold available, it's no surprise that gold IRA firms are increasingly popular for investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Experts estimate that we have less than 55,000 tons of gold left to discover. Even so, we can't be sure how much of this amount can be extracted. We know that the Earth's crust is golden at a ratio of approximately four parts per billion. We also know that gold can be found and extracted from the ocean, which is thought to contain about 10,000 tons of gold.
The continent of Antarctica is even known to have large gold deposits buried deep in the ice. The industrial trade group The World Gold Council estimates that, since the first gold pearl was melted, humans have extracted approximately 190,000 metric tons of gold, approximately 77% of the world's recoverable reserves. Extracting gold from other elements is also incredibly expensive, but more than that, the process results in gold that is too radioactive to be used safely by humans. This suggests that if new technologies were developed that would allow the profitable extraction of gold with lower than usual gold densities, there could be much more gold left in the world (discoverable, extractable and refinable) than seems to be the case today.
On the other hand, the sharp increase in production costs in the last 15 years alone, combined with the unavoidable mathematics that shows how quickly miners are exhausting the Earth's remaining recoverable gold reserves, suggest that, in the coming years, production costs could start to rise again as the world runs out of untapped gold. The California Gold Rush, from 1848 to 1855, brought the world's total historical gold production to more than 20,000 metric tons. If these deposits became commonplace, the increase in the price of gold, combined with the decrease in the supply of gold on land, could cause a new underwater gold rush and multiply the amount of gold that (we thought) was left in the world. In fact, about 50% of all the gold that has been mined has been mined since 1967, and 80% of all the gold that has been brought to the surface has been mined since 1910, according to the U.
However, gold becomes difficult to trace once it is used in jewelry, so our figures on the amount of gold they contain may be uncertain. While gold prices reached an all-time high in August, this does not automatically translate into an increase in gold mining activity. As the Earth's gold reserves dwindle and gold prices rise, this could push explorers and developers to find new sources of gold in places where no miner has gone before. Therefore, 24-carat gold is pure gold; 12K would be an alloy that is half gold and half copper or other metals.
Most of the gold produced today is used for the manufacture of jewelry, but gold is also an essential industrial metal that plays critical roles in computers, communications equipment, spaceships, jet engines and many other products. This suggests that if new technologies were developed that would allow for the profitable extraction of gold with lower than usual gold densities, there could be much more gold left in the world that can be discovered, extracted and refined than it currently appears to be. Most often, gold is used to make jewelry and gold investment products and is widely used in industrial sectors: gold is used in computers, communications equipment, jet engines and many other products. .
