I reached a thousand finds and was gifted a 'golden ammo can,' but I procrastinated for years on putting it out. I am now over three thousand finds, so it's time. I will now commence the self-plaudit cloaked in the guise of humility and genuine appreciation that this cache deserves for the mockery and comedy "gold." I have participated in many geocaching adventures and contributed to a puzzle series, a massive puzzle, and other hiding endeavors. I have cached in many states, too. I have embarked on quests of insanity by crawling into caves and drain pipes, climbing trees and pillars, navigating through thickets, and so much more. So, in the orderly fashion of my geocaching paradigm, you have to solve a puzzle. Good luck.
Gold is underappreciated because of the idolization of its appearance. People often think of the California Gold Rush, when thousands gave up their money, time, and homes to go to California in desperate hope of finding gold .However, gold has been used in scientific and technological applications.
It is used in computer hardware for its high conductivity and malleability, which makes it easy to work with. It was also used on mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope because of its excellence in reflecting light, particularly in the infrared range.
The gold plating on the telescope's mirror is only one hundred nanometers thick, roughly one-ten-thousandth of a millimeter .The JWST captured “images” of Neptune in far greater detail than its predecessor, Hubble .With the combined contributions of Hubble and JWST, the “images” were detailed enough to see auroras on Neptune.
The word “images” continuously appears in quotation marks because they were taken in infrared, a wavelength humans cannot detect, and translated into visible light — specifically blue. There are even uses for gold in medical fields. The standardized tests for COVID-19 during the pandemic incorporated gold into the test strips. The gold nanoparticles accumulate at the designated lines to indicate the presence, or lack thereof, of virus particles.
The molecular structure of gold is a face-centered cubic structure at room temperature .
In 1940, the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark .At the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, two Nobel prizes were hidden from the Nazis, afraid the Nazis would steal them for their value in gold — and because Max von Laue and James Franck, the owners of the medals, were outspoken critics of the Nazi regime .However, a Hungarian-Jewish chemist, George de Hevesy, had an idea. De Hevesy used aqua regia (“royal water”), a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, to dissolve the gold into a solution.
The solution was placed among other formulae in the lab, and when the Nazis searched the building, they never thought it worth checking the simple vial among many others that looked similar. Once the occupation was over, de Hevesy used a reducing agent to retrieve the gold from the solution. The gold was sent to the Nobel Foundation in Sweden, where it was reforged into new Nobel prizes and given back to their respective owners. Later, this act, combined with his contributions to radioactive tracers, earned him his own Nobel Prize in 1943 .
The bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans naturally produces small quantities of gold. It works with Delftia acidovorans to aid in the creation of gold nuggets .They cooperate to precipitate gold from auric chloride, which is quite toxic for most other microorganisms .Mount Erebus, an active volcano in Antarctica, releases about eighty grams of gold vapor daily.
Mount Erebus is also the southernmost volcano on Earth .The Pavlof volcano in Alaska also emits gold during eruptions; it also emits silver. Seafloor volcanoes spew out superheated, mineral-rich fluids containing gold, silver, copper, and other minerals.
Phra Phutta Maha Suwan Patimakon, or the Golden Buddha, is the largest pure-gold structure.
It weighs roughly 5,500 kilograms or about 12,125 pounds .There is also a temple in India, Harmandir Sahib, or the Golden Temple, which contains 750 kilograms of gold .
The Sun contains what some estimate to be almost two sextillion kilograms of gold .Another way to visualize that, though equally unhelpful, is that you could make more than six trillion solid-gold Empire State Buildings .To date, the Welcome Stranger is the largest gold nugget ever found .
It was 97.14 kilograms or a little more than 214 pounds. It was found in an alluvium deposit, making it an alluvial gold nugget .The Welcome Stranger was discovered by two Cornish miners (miners from Cornwall), John Deason and Richards Oates. It was found on 5 February 1846, nine miles northwest of Dunolly, Victoria, Australia.
The depth at which it was located is surprisingly shallow; only 3 centimeters, or 1.2 inches, below ground level .At the time of its discovery, it was too massive to be weighed by conventional scales. To weigh it, it was taken to a Dunolly-based blacksmith, Archibald Walls, who used his anvil to break the nugget into three pieces, which were then weighed individually. In 2019, the Welcome Stranger would have been 3.4 million USD .
In 1897, an obelisk was erected near the discovery sight to commemorate its finding. For thousands of years, humankind, via the pursuit of alchemy, attempted to synthesize gold from other materials; usually other metals .And, while alchemy is an illegitimate science, synthesizing gold is possible using the tools and understanding of modernity .
The first successful synthesis of gold was in 1924 when Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka used neutron bombardment of mercury to synthesize gold .A team of scientists in the United States who did not know Nagaoka's research achieved the same result using the same method in 1941. They additionally showed that every isotope of gold produced by this method was radioactive.
In the Lawerence Berkley Laboratory, in 1980, Glenn Seaborg transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold .In 2017, gold was detected in spectroscopic signatures, along with other heavy metals, in the wake of the GW170817 neutron star merger event. And, it was more concreted after gravitational wave detectors confirmed the event as a neutron star merger.
Our current astrophysical models indicate that the amount of gold produced was between three and thirteen Earth masses. Electrum is an alloy of elemental gold and twenty or more percent silver; its common name is 'white gold .'Fool's gold, formally called 'pyrite,' can contain small amounts of true gold. There are even mining operations to extract pyrite and remove the gold from it, instead of sourcing out of a direct goldmine.
Gold is used in scanning electron microscopes. Gold, or an alloy of gold and palladium, is applied to nonconductive materials, such as biological ones, to enhance their conductivity and ease of viewing .The gold coating is applied by sputtering it on with an argon plasma. Gold has been used in many applications, across millennia, for profit, science, and innovation; so go get your gold (or mine, depending on how you look at it).
Now, to solve the puzzle . Good luck .
And… to find the cache .
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