Mining
11 Stunning Visualizations of Gold Show Its Value and Rarity
The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.
Since Ancient times, gold has served a very unique function in society.
Gold is extremely rare, impossible to create out of “thin air”, easily identifiable, malleable, and it does not tarnish. By nature of these properties, gold has been highly valued throughout history for every tiny ounce of weight. That’s why it’s been used by people for centuries as a monetary metal, a symbol of wealth, and a store of value.
Visualizing Gold’s Value and Rarity
With all that value coming from such a small package, sometimes it is hard to put gold’s immense worth into context.
The following 11 images help to capture this about gold, putting things into better perspective.
1. The U.S. median income, as a gold cube, easily fits in the palm of your hand.
2. A gold cube worth $1 million, has sides that are 2/3 the length of a typical banknote.
3. All gold used for electrical connections in the Columbia Space Shuttle would be worth $1.6 million today.
4. Trump’s entire fortune of $3.7 billion as a gold cube would be shorter than Trump himself.
5. As a gold cube, the entire value of the Bitcoin market would fit in a hallway.
6. The fortune of the richest man on Earth, Bill Gates, would take up a single traffic lane.
7. The world’s entire annual production of gold is just a 5.5m sided (18 ft) cube.
8. Take the 147.3 million oz of gold out of Fort Knox, and it’s only slightly bigger.
9. All gold held by the Central Banks pales in comparison to the Brandenburg Gate.
10. All gold mined in human history is dwarfed by the Statue of Liberty.
11. To pay off $63 trillion of global sovereign debt, you’d need a gold cube the size of a building.
Liked our visualizations of gold cubes? Check out this motion graphic video that shows how much money has been created by humans.
The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.
Uranium
Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country
We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium reserves by country, with 3 countries accounting for more than half of total reserves.
Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
There can be a tendency to believe that uranium deposits are scarce from the critical role it plays in generating nuclear energy, along with all the costs and consequences related to the field.
But uranium is actually fairly plentiful: it’s more abundant than gold and silver, for example, and about as present as tin in the Earth’s crust.
We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium resources by country, as of 2021. Figures come from the World Nuclear Association, last updated on August 2023.
Ranked: Uranium Reserves By Country (2021)
Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada have the largest shares of available uranium resources—accounting for more than 50% of total global reserves.
But within these three, Australia is the clear standout, with more than 1.7 million tonnes of uranium discovered (28% of the world’s reserves) currently. Its Olympic Dam mine, located about 600 kilometers north of Adelaide, is the the largest single deposit of uranium in the world—and also, interestingly, the fourth largest copper deposit.
Despite this, Australia is only the fourth biggest uranium producer currently, and ranks fifth for all-time uranium production.
Country | Share of Global Reserves | Uranium Reserves (Tonnes) |
---|---|---|
🇦🇺 Australia | 28% | 1.7M |
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan | 13% | 815K |
🇨🇦 Canada | 10% | 589K |
🇷🇺 Russia | 8% | 481K |
🇳🇦 Namibia | 8% | 470K |
🇿🇦 South Africa | 5% | 321K |
🇧🇷 Brazil | 5% | 311K |
🇳🇪 Niger | 5% | 277K |
🇨🇳 China | 4% | 224K |
🇲🇳 Mongolia | 2% | 145K |
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan | 2% | 131K |
🇺🇦 Ukraine | 2% | 107K |
🌍 Rest of World | 9% | 524K |
Total | 100% | 6M |
Figures are rounded.
Outside the top three, Russia and Namibia both have roughly the same amount of uranium reserves: about 8% each, which works out to roughly 470,000 tonnes.
South Africa, Brazil, and Niger all have 5% each of the world’s total deposits as well.
China completes the top 10, with a 3% share of uranium reserves, or about 224,000 tonnes.
A caveat to this is that current data is based on known uranium reserves that are capable of being mined economically. The total amount of the world’s uranium is not known exactly—and new deposits can be found all the time. In fact the world’s known uranium reserves increased by about 25% in the last decade alone, thanks to better technology that improves exploration efforts.
Meanwhile, not all uranium deposits are equal. For example, in the aforementioned Olympic Dam, uranium is recovered as a byproduct of copper mining occurring at the same site. In South Africa, it emerges as a byproduct during treatment of ores in the gold mining process. Orebodies with high concentrations of two substances can increase margins, as costs can be shared for two different products.
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