Platinum Standard

Platinum Ore

When I put together the most recent reddit Gallery for this blog, I looked at the platinum ore pictured and wondered how nature can aggregate oodles the platinum atoms in one place? Common sense suggests that the randomness at the start of things would create and/or distribute element atoms in a rather random and unspecific way ... an example of entropy. However, some natural forces such as gravity and magnetism did help to arrange certain elements, like iron, cobalt, nickel and the lighter gasses, together. But platinum? What subtle natural process gathered untold numbers of platinum atoms together to form the lump of ore pictured?

For the sake of argument let's assume that, during the Earth's formation, 37 of every 100,000 atoms were platinum atoms ...  see: Periodic Table Facts. What conceivable process could cause them to find each other to form the metal contained in an ore? Certainly when the Earth's crust was molten, over a billion years ago, there was a possibility of platinum atoms migrating towards one anther.  But how? Are there factors in the weak or strong atomic forces in physics that cause like atoms to seek out their likes in liquids or gasses? If there are, then nature has once again served mankind with a gratuitous benefit. Otherwise, we never could assemble enough disparate atoms of almost any element to utilize them the way we so effectively do today.

Just one more example of entropy not living up to its ballyhooed threat reputation.