Bugs grow gold says Australian scientist Frank Reith January 27th, and John Parsons owner of The Prophet Gold mine in Kilkivan west of Gympie (Qld, Australia) according to the Courier Mail Wednesday 28th January, 2004 p6. Reith and Parsons said the late Macquarie geologist Gunther Bishoff had first demonstrated the theory on samples from his mine in 1995. “People have cut nuggets open and found growth rings”, Mr Parsons says. “This can happen very fast in places like Brazil where the soil environment is very nutritious and wet.” Bacteria can lay down gold at the rate of 1 grain per year.” There are 15.4 grains in a gram of gold. DNA tests showed bacteria and fungi in soil were linked with gold nuggets, but unlike relatively fast growing coral reefs, monster gold nuggets could take millions of years to form in dry Australian conditions.
Editorial Comment: This editor’s father was a miner, who always used to tell his son, (a university graduate in geology), that rocks grew in the ground. His university trained son scorned this until he began clearing his own property and looking for a bit of gold here and there. Not only do common rocks such as iron based ones grow rapidly in the ground, but it was very evident in the Australian gold fields, gold nuggets mostly bore no relationship to alluvial deposits. The common feeling amongst nugget hunters was that they did grow where you found them. This new evidence would certainly back up this idea.
However, the “millions of years in a dry Australia” is yet another example of the uniformitarianism that plagues geology. The widespread laterised red soils in Australia are abundant evidence Australia was warmer and wetter in the past. In a Biblical perspective, it would have been saturated after Noah’s Flood and has been drying out ever since. Present rate of nugget growth would therefore be minimal compared to previous rates. Now, should you be able to use this new information in artificially precipitating gold out of ground waters by seeding bacteria, send some of the profits to Creation Research to help our work!