Julie Berdar, . age 13, of Somerville, New Jersey, for her question:

Is it true that there is plenty of gold in the sea?

The topic of gold is in the news and many thoughtful readers are trying to grasp what the uproar is all about. Our country and several other countries are complaining about national shortages of the shiny yellow metal, We also hear that there is.gold in the sea and sensible students wonder why this cannot be used to solve the problem.  Marine biologists estimate that the total world oceans contain as many tons of precious gold. This is much more than all the gold ever mined from the stubborn ground. It would, you might think be enough to solve all the money problems of the world's nations , plus a small amount for everyone to start a personal savings account.

However, the problems involved in this simple idea are immense. What's more, if we did manage to extract a11 that gold from the sea, it might be unable to help. Part of the value of gold depends its scarcity. If we had more than we needed, it would lose its value as a medium of exchange. A nickel coin is less valuable than a gold coin of the same weight because nickel is more plentiful than gold. Lea's forget the idea of extracting all the gold from the sea. Perhaps the gold shortage could be solved by extracting only a few tons of the precious metal. But that also has its insurmountable problems. There are about 330 million cubic miles of salty water in the world oceans. Each cubic mile contains about 36 tons of dissolved gold. The same cubic mile although it contains roughly 166 million tons of other dissolved chemicals.

This amount of water is enough to fill a medium small lake,20 feet deep,.20 miles wide and 26 miles long. So far, no one has found an easy way to separate the dissolved gold from the water and the other chemicals. True, it can be done. But the price of gold has a fixed value, and present methods of sifting it from the sea cost more than the gold is worth. If some smart science student finds a cheap way to reclaim the sea's gold, it would add to our nation's gold reserves. He could not, however, put his found gold into a savings account to make himself rich.  

Ordinary folk have to strain their brains to understand all the delicate problems involved in the national and international problems of gold as a medium of exchange. Most people even are bewildered by the antiquated method of weighing gold. A pound of gold, for example, weighs quite a bit less than a pound of sugar. Gold, silver and platinum usually are weighed in troy ounces with 12 troy ounces to a troy pound. An avoirdupois pound of sugar equals the weight of 7,000 average grains of wheat. A troy pound of gold is 1240 grains lighter.