Rick Monteverde wrote:
Natural gold "reefs" (prospectors dream of them in vivid living color) are generally thought to occur as a result of bacteria colonies that at the very least concentrated the element from solution in flowing water. Maybe they mutated the Au out of other elements, who knows.
That is the first thing that occurred to me when Joe called! I mentioned to him that many coral species and others can extract minute amounts of some elements from seawater, such as iodine.
Arthur Clarke wrote about an imaginary species of coral bioengineered to extract gold from seawater, in "Imperial Earth."
- Jed
