Gold bars are pictured at the Ginza Tanaka store in Tokyo October 23, 2009.
Everything changes, but Gold still remains a highly valued metal. It reaching record highs recently, climbing over 135% in value in the past year alone. The recent rise in the price of gold comes just as annual worldwide mine production has decreased – down by nearly 8% since 2001.
A total of 161,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, as of 2009. Modern industrial uses include dentistry and electronics, where gold has traditionally found use because of its good resistance to oxidative corrosion and excellent quality as a conductor of electricity.
Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all metals; a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of 1 square meter, or an ounce into 300 square feet. Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become translucent.
Here are some photos of people searching for, mining, rediscovering, buying and selling gold. [Gold via Boston]
A visitor touches the world’s largest solid gold brick weighing 220kg (worth over US $7.8 million), at the Jinguashi Gold Museum in Ruifang, Taipei county, on December 2, 2009.
Hava Katz, the head of the national treasures of Israel’s Antiquities Authority, holds up a 1,000-year-old gold coin minted in Egypt and dated 1,095 AD, supposedly brought to Jerusalem by Muslim pilgrims, during an exhibition at the Davidson Archeological center in Jerusalem’s Old city on November 11, 2009.
A statue of a bird of prey made of gold is pictured at a gold and silver exhibition at the Ginza Tanaka store in Tokyo October 23, 2009.
A man holds a spoon full of gold leaf, ready to eat it with his sushi at the “Seven Sushi Samurai” Sushi of the Year awards 2009 at the Olympia exhibition center in west London, on November 14, 2009. Thegold leaf was an ingredient in last year’s winner Mitsunori Kusakabe’s entry.
Gold figurines on display in a shop window in Hong Kong on November 17, 2009.
Metal detector enthusiast David Booth poses with his hoard of Iron Age Gold on November 4, 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Booth discovered the gold Iron Age torcs buried on on private land in Stirlingshire – the items dating from between 300-100 BC. The hoard is currently under protection of the Treasure Trove Unit, under Scottish law, the Crown can claim any archaeological objects found in Scotland.
A gold miner pushes a wheelbarrow to carry rocks which will be processed for gold in an artisanal mine in Abangares, north of San Jose, Costa Rica on December 9, 2009. Costa Rica is pushing to legalize a 600 informal miners of small-scale miners who scrape out tiny amounts ofgold from abandoned mine shafts using dangerous and polluting techniques
People work in an illegal gold mine in a national park forest near Novo Progresso in Brazil’s northern state of Paral on September 15, 2009.
A Christie’s employee looks at a creation “Relief Eponge” by Yves Klein on display at the auction
house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The gold sponge relief creation is to be auctioned at the “Post-war and Contemporary” sale on Feb. 11 with an estimated price of 5.7 to 8 million euros (US $8.2 to 11.4 million).
A Caterpillar Inc. mining truck moves along a road at the AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. Cripple Creek & Victor gold mine in Victor/Cripple Creek, Colorado, on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009. AngloGold Ashanti Ltd., Africa’s largest gold producer, purchased Golden Cycle Gold Corp. in January 2008 to gain full control of this mining site, its only active operation in the U.S.
Gold-plated Berlin Bear awards are lined up for the upcoming Berlinale International Film Festival at Noak bronze foundry in Berlin January 20, 2010.
Bulgarian archaeologist Veselin Ignatov holds a gold-plated silver cup with an image of the Greek God of love Eros, found at a Thracian mound near the village of Karanovo, Bulgaria on November 17, 2009. A team of archaeologists led by Ignatov found a chariot, two silver cups, golden rings and jewelry, clay and glass artifacts dating back to the first century A.D.
A Japanese girl admires a gold model named “Wishing to shooting stars” at a gold and silver craft exhibition in Tokyo on October 23, 2009. The 30cm-tall, 15kg pure gold artifact is worth 130 million yen (US $1.3 million).
A goldsmith works on a gold ornament at a workshop in Chandigarh, India on November 23, 2009.
Pure gold casting grain is displayed for a photograph at Dvir & Stoler Refining in New York, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 4, 2010.
Those black-and-white photographs still remind us of how the Americans always paid attention to the wonderful architecture and the marvelous construction of their skyscrapers. It displayed their advanced thought-process and progressive approach in various fields.
The skyscrapers surely remind of the Spiderman series, with no reflective glass elevations but with false sky intervals along with the presence of overly done stone walls. The active night clubs, the subtle smells from the Jewish restaurants also used to add color to the citizen’s lives.
What is more fascinating is the way the old postcards and preserved pictures simply provide a beautiful insight into the amazing history of this beautiful city in the traditional landscape.
The Hudson Terminal Building, one of the largest office buildings in the world, was massively built covering 2 square blocks, making the WTC towers stand upright on this space later. In fact, majority of these skyscrapers are more than a century old, and are still standing tall and high compared to the structures in different places.
The yesteryear architecture too has its own appeal with contemporary landscape.
