Gold, which is as old as the earth itself and found and extracted on all continents, is more fiercely protected by us than anything else we know. And to protect it best, we bury it in the Earth whence it came. A kind of man-made Earth.At Friends of the Pleistocene, via Bldgblog, a tour underneath the Federal Reserve building in New York yields a small gold mine of human geology.The vault is located five stories beneath the street, on top of New York's granite bedrock. After exiting the elevator and watching a short film, our small group walked through a narrow hallway and paused in front of the thin blue gates. On the other side: 7,000 tons of gold with an estimated value of about $275 billion dollars.
The New York Federal Reserve bank is a place where humans have encased geology within geology. They've unfolded and refolded stratifications of limestone, sandstone, iron and gold so they could put the gold on the inside–where it can be hyper-protected because of its high, human-assigned [value…
If you start in the vault at the core of the building and work your way out to the street, you travel through cosmic and geologic time. The gold behind the blue gates is pre-earthian. This purified element was](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard) born of supernova (of the type II variety) shortly before the earth coalesced. Next you pass through solid Manhattan bedrock (450 million years old), up through the building's walls composed of Indiana Limestone (Middle Mississippian, 335-340 million years ago) and Ohio Sandstone (Early Mississippian, 350 Million years).
The rock that encases the gold at the Fed (which, by the way, belongs to a number of countries) is certainly stronger than Die Hard with a Vengeance would suggest: a conventional explosion nearby, like the sort that Jeremy Irons' character engineers in the film, wouldn't be enough to break in and haul off half the vault (to say nothing of the paltry number of dump trucks they used).From Die Hard with a Vengeance (1994)
We haven't even started talking about the cultural aura that Au has, about how amazing it is that we extract a mineral and guard it more than anything else, center part of our economies on it, revere its seemingly ancient power as if it were a God. A God, and not just some shiny rock that came out of the Earth and is used, in many deeply ironic ways, to dig into that Earth, and spoil it.From "Gold and You"
Sure, they're operating on different timescales, but this is where, symbolically at least, the slow and mighty force of geological activity comes head to head with the fast and unrelenting determination of civilization to develop at great cost. They needn't be enemies necessarily, but they kinda are. The proof is bomb-proof.Read more at FOP and Wikipedia. And sign up for your own free tour here.