Australia has the largest mining gold reserves anywhere in the world at 10,000 metric tons, followed by Russia at 7,500 metric tons. But there is another place that actually has about 2,000 times more gold contained in it than Australia. It is the world’s oceans.
There is believed to be about 20 million metric tons of gold in the ocean worth a mind-boggling $1.1 quadrillion based on today’s gold prices. This is more than 12 times the entire world’s 2019 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at $87.55 trillion. The oceans have so much gold that every person on earth could have almost 6 pounds of it.
Unfortunately, extracting gold from the ocean is extremely difficult and cost-prohibitive. Each liter of seawater contains 13 billionths of a gram of gold, so the concentration is minuscule and in parts per trillion. There is also gold under the seafloor, but it is deep in the rock beneath the ocean floor one or two miles underwater.
No one has been able to come up with a cost-efficient way to mine gold from the ocean or extract it from seawater as of yet. Maybe you’ll be the first one to come up with a plan. Good Luck!
Sources: NOAA, Science Direct, Forbes, Harvard
