According to the National Ocean Service, our oceans hold some 20 million pounds of gold, suspended in normal seawater. But this gold is spread throughout the normal mineral content of seawater to the tune of “parts per trillion.” As the NOAA puts it, “Each litre of seawater contains, on average, about 13 billionths of a gram of gold.” There are also gold deposits within the seafloor, but profitably mining them is far beyond humans’ current abilities.
Nonetheless, gold is gold, and it has a way of making people believe all sorts of speculative things. Ever since British chemist Edward Sonstadt di
scovered that there was gold in seawater in 1872, there have been those who have tried to capitalize on it, honestly or not.
While it is indeed a fact that gold is contained in seawater, the difficulty of extracting the gold lies in its extremely dilute existence. Although 20 million tons of gold may seem like an amazing amount when you spread that throughout the entire ocean, you get a quantity of roughly 0.004 parts per BILLION. Another way to think about it would be that you would have to process around 30 million pounds of seawater to extract one ounce of gold. We are talking such minuscule quantities that it is hard to even wrap your head around it. That is definitely too stressful. Also explains why miners have not gone to the ocean to harvest some.
Many have considered that perhaps some type of mechanism could be attached to travelling ships, which could work as some sort of collection device. To date, no one has been able to design such a device. From time to time, you will hear someone make claims about successfully recovering gold from seawater, but they are generally looking for investors to take it to the next level (i.e. gullible people to give them money). These fraudsters appear from time to time and then recede into the shadows, with the seawater gold remaining safely in its place.
Divers Find £29K Worth Of Gold On Ocean Floor [VIDEO]https://youtu.be/PmqGdrGKckw
With technological advancements in the world, no one can predict what will happen. Maybe at some point in the future, someone will come up with a method to mine the ocean’s gold. But for now, such a project is economically unfeasible, so we will continue to search for gold on the land.
