Home Info-Graphs 12 Stunning Visualizations of Gold Shows Its Rarity

12 Stunning Visualizations of Gold Shows Its Rarity

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It’s hard to believe that such a small amount of gold could be worth so much, and that is why great visualizations can help us understand the rarity of this yellow metal. Luckily, the folks at Demonocracy.info have done the heavy lifting for us, putting together a series of 3D visualizations of gold bullion bars showcasing the world’s gold that has been mined thus far. Note: these visualizations are a couple of years old and optimistically have the value of gold pegged at US$2,000 per oz, presumably for the ease of calculations.

For those interested, we have also put together a similar slideshow on the topic, showing how much gold, silver, copper, and other metals are mined each year.

Gold bullion bars in lower denominations
Smaller denominations of gold plates: 1 gram, 5 grams, 10 grams, 20 grams, and 1 troy oz of gold.

Gold bullion bars including a 1 kilo bar
Larger denominations of gold plates: 50 grams, 100 grams, 250 grams, 500 grams, and 1 kg of gold.

400 oz gold bar
This 400 oz gold bar, at $2,000 per oz gold, is worth the $800,000 cash beside it. The gold bar is extremely heavy, weighing more than three full milk jugs.

One tonne of gold
Here’s what one tonne of gold looks like. At $2,000 per oz, it’s worth $64.3 million.

Truck full of gold
Gold is so heavy that the suspension of an average truck would break if it held anymore than pictured above. Even if the truck’s suspension broke, the load of gold in the back could buy 2,660 brand new trucks at an MSRP of $40,000 per truck.

10 tonnes vs 100 tonnes of gold
Here’s 10 tonnes of gold compared to 100 tonnes of the yellow metal.

Semi-truck carrying the legal maximum weight in gold
This semi-truck is carrying the maximum load it can legally carry, which is about about 25 tonnes. Here there are 24.88 tonnes of gold, worth $1.6 billion.

B2 Bomber with how much gold it costs
The Northrop Grumman B2 Spirit Bomber program cost $44.75 Billion for a total of 21 units built, which averages to $2,130,952,380 per unit. Shown here is the amount of gold it costs to buy one unit.

The United States' Gold Reserves
Here’s the entire gold reserves of the United States government, which is 8,133.5 tonnes.

World gold reserves
Here’s the world’s gold reserves by government circa 2012. This is slightly outdated, with China and Russia both having significant increases since then.

All the gold in the world
All gold mined in history, stacked in 400 oz bars. The 166,500 tonnes here is actually divided into four levels: the bottom level is jewelry (50.5% of all gold), the 2nd level is private investment (18.7%), the third level is world governments (17.4%), and the highest level is other uses for gold such as industry (13.4%).

All the gold in one cube
Lastly, we finish off with an image of all of the world’s mined gold in one cube with dimensions of 20.5m. If it was all melted, it would fit within the confines of an Olympic Swimming Pool.

Via Visual Capitalist 

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