The Golden Crust That Is Too Deep to Reach

If you could teleport to the center of the Earth and bring all the gold back to the surface, every person on the planet could be a billionaire. There is enough gold locked inside Earth's core to cover the entire land surface of the globe in a shimmering layer 1.5 feet thick.

The gold is there because of a planetary sinking spell. When the Earth was a molten ball of fire, heavy metals like iron and nickel sank toward the center. Gold, which is chemically attracted to iron, hitched a ride and settled 1,800 miles below our feet.

This means the gold we mine today shouldn't actually be here. The surface should be completely stripped of precious metals. The rings on your fingers only exist because of a massive meteorite bombardment that happened about 200 million years after the Earth formed, essentially re-seeding the crust with a fresh delivery of space gold.

The core is so hot and under so much pressure that the gold isn't in gold bars; it is dissolved in a sea of liquid iron. This metallic ocean creates the magnetic field that protects us from solar radiation. Without that churning golden-iron mix, our atmosphere would have been blown away long ago.

While we know the gold is there, we have no way to get it. The deepest hole ever drilled by humans only went 7.6 miles down, barely scratching the skin of the planet.