The gold mining industry has been thousands of years old, but it is estimated that about 86 per cent of gold has been mined over the past 200 years. The United States was the largest gold-producing country in the 1890s, but with the sharp rise in gold prices in the 1980s, China surpassed the United States in 2007 and joined Russia and Australia in 31 per cent of global production in 2022. With modern mining technologies making large-scale production possible, global gold production has grown ...