A world built on sand

News Snapshot:

An open-pit gold mine in New South Wales, Australia. Photo by Getty Outside the small town of Spruce Pine in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, there is a set of white buildings ringed by two-storey fences and security guards. Beneath these buildings is a geological formation created 380 million years ago when two palaeocontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, crossed the great Rhxeic Ocean and smushed (not a technical term) into each other, creating a single huge landmass: Pangaea. Several miles beneath the surface, as the tectonic plates crunched together, minerals were heated and mixed in a subterranean crucible that was,...