How much gold is there?
The amount of gold found on earth is estimated to be 184,000 tonnes by the World Gold Council. It is also distributed between government reserves, bank vaults, and individual collections. However, most of the gold is uneconomic to mine, so it remains in deposits. One cubic metre of pure gold weighs nearly 19 tonnes. It is estimated that all the known amounts of the precious metal could fit onto a football pitch in a layer just a metre thick.
Some estimates of the amount of gold on earth vary widely. According to Warren Buffett, the amount of gold on earth would fit into a cube measuring 20 metres. However, other estimates have put the amount at between 165 and 170,000 tonnes. This means that the amount of real gold on earth is extremely small. This is despite the fact that there are only a few thousand kilograms of gold in the world. To answer the question of how much is there, we should start by looking at the number of people living in the world and the total quantity of it.
Natural gold is 65%-98% pure. In other words, it is almost worthless. As we know, human-made currencies eventually lose their value, but a pure piece of gold never goes out of style. The United States is the leading country when it comes to stockpiling gold, with its 813 tonnes at the end of June. The other top 10 countries holding the precious metal include Germany, France, Russia, and Italy.
The quantity of gold discovered is quite large, but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that it is 244,000 metric tons. Miners have discovered about half of that amount in the past decade. The remaining reserves, according to the World Gold Council, are only 30% of what has been extracted, corresponding to 54,000 tonnes. But that still represents an astonishing amount of gold! The question is, how much of it is there?
Currently, half of the world's gold has been extracted from the earth, but the majority has been extracted by humans. The rest has been mined, but a massive 20% of the gold in the earth is still untapped. But how much is there left to be mined? It depends on where you look. There are a few sources for gold. A mined gold deposit can be anywhere between 50,000 and 60,000 tonnes.
As of the end of 2018, the U.S. owns about 8,133.5 tonnes of gold. Of this, 210 tonnes were produced in 2018. This is an increase of eleven percent compared to last year. With all that gold, the price of this precious metal is $8.6 billion. So, how much of the metal? It is a matter of belief and speculation, but we should not underestimate its value. And the gold in the earth is plentiful.
The demand for the precious metal isn't expected to stay stable for the foreseeable future. As the global demand for sophisticated electronics continues to expand, the amount of gold that is mined is likely to be much smaller than the current total. But as long as the planet's population grows, there will be a huge need for the precious metal. The question is, how much is there? That is, how much is it worth?
The U.S. Geological Survey reports that there are approximately twenty million tonnes of gold on earth. There is a lot of water in the world, but that's still a lot of gold. The amount of gold in a litre of water contains 13 billionths of a gram, so it would take 77 million litres of ocean water to accumulate a gram. A single gold sovereign is found in every six16,000,000 liters of seawater.
As of 2016, the world is producing 50 million ounces of gold each year. That's roughly equivalent to what is being mined today in a single cubic kilometer. Therefore, there is only about ten billion ounces of gold on earth. There are only a few hundred million tons of gold in the world, but the remaining amount is much smaller. That's a huge number. It's worth about five trillion ounces.