MOTHER LODE: Eucalyptus leaf samples showing traces of manganese.MELVYN LINTERN
At the tail end of the century in which most major gold rushes took place around the globe, Emil Lungwitz reported something unusual: plants seemed to be picking up the precious metal. Writing in the Mining Journal in 1900, Lungwitz—an inventor from Brooklyn, New York—described “the lixiviation of gold deposits by vegetation.”
After more than a century, Lungwitz’s keen observation may help modern-day prospectors hit their own mother lodes. This past October, researchers in Australia found evidence of gold particles inside the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia and located a deposit of gold more than 100 feet beneath it. “Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered ...
