The size ofgo ld

Gold is so malleable that just 1 gram can be hammered into a sheet 1 square meter in size. Major mining sources are China, Russia, Australia and Canada. The best estimates currently available suggest that around 193 million kg (or 193 000 tonnes) of gold have been mined throughout history.

To help picture what this looks like, imagine all this gold was shaped into 1 x 1 x 1 metre cubes. Each cube has a volume of 1 cubic metre or 1 000 000 cubic centimetres. One cubic centimetre of gold has a mass of 19.3 grams so each gold cube would have a mass of about 19.3 tonnes. (That’s very heavy compared to water, where a 1 x 1 x 1 metre cube would have a mass of only 1 tonne).

So we would be looking at about 10 000 cubic metres of gold mined on our earth so far. And as an Olympic swimming pool has a volume of 2500 cubic metres, then that’s enough gold to fill about 4 Olympic swimming pools.