sniff out gold?

[grungymike]

This doesn't have anything to do with metal detectors, but a fellow river rat posed a question that got me to thinking, after I stopped laughing.

Pigs have been trained to sniff out truffles, dogs have been trained to sniff out buried bodies, has anyone ever tried to train a pig or dog or (?)
to sniff out gold nuggets?

gm

[Fred]

The question is not as crazy as it sounds,
But if gold is so stable i don´t think it has any odor.

[J_Player]

This is interesting...
The gold ring on your finger will not have any odour detectable by people. But if there is copper in the alloy, then the acids in your skin could dissolve some trace amount of the copper into an acid solution, which could in turn become airborne to some small degree where a dog could smell it. The dog would not e smelling gold, but copper. This doesn't seem too likely, but is theoretically possible for the sake of discussion.

But buried gold is not the same as gold in the air. Scientist have discovered that after gold is buried a long time, microbes can attack it by excreting tiny amounts of cyanide, which dissolve a trace amount of gold from the surface of a buried gold item. The scientists also discovered the trace amounts of gold ions will rise in the soil, migrating in a column to the surface, where they eventually become bound with other soil constituents within 10-30 cm of the surface. As the gold ions migrate upward over many years, they form a trail of trace amounts of gold ions suspended in sulfur complexes or organic acids that are chemically neutralized in this final 10-30 cm of the surface of the ground. This chemistry of buried gold dissolving and moving upward is well established by thousands of tests.

Now, considering these chemicals that are becoming neutralized near the surface (10-30cm), do you suppose it is possible some trace amounts of hydrogen cyanide gas is released into the air where the gold ions are rising above the treasure? Maybe the organic acids and sulfur complexes are releasing gases such as hydrogen sulfide in very trace amounts that a dog can smell. Could the combination of odours from these gold-related chemicals be a signature for buried gold that we can train a dog to locate?

After all... dogs and pigs have been trained to smelll the odours of organic activity where truffles are growing under the ground.

Best wishes,
J_P

[Max]

Don't sniff...

But if you have to do... at least inject that stuff!

Red nosed people are too easy to locate...

[grungymike]

Been there, done that, outgrew it, but fun while it lasted.

gm

[Max]