Abstract:The cold seawater penetrates down into thepermeable crust and is heated to rise to the seafloor, these processes cause the water—rock interaction and drive the cycling of gold in modern seafloor hydrothermal systems, even the great commercial prospects for the goldrich deposits thus can be accumulated on the seafloor. The significant amounts of gold is leached from deeper levels in the oceanic crust during hydrothermal alteration, and then dissolve in the hydrothermal fluids which may finally enrich about 1000 times with respect to seawater and subsequently rise rapidly to the seafloor. Phase separation may also occur at more than one location during the hydrothermal fluids’ passage through the oceanic crust leads to gold enrichment in the vapour phase. The gold coprecipitates with the sulfide assemblages from the vent fluids as the effect of cooling and the decrease ofH2S concentrations from mixing with the seawater. The host rock compositions and the tectonic setting leave a strong imprint on the gold contents of the associated seafloor hydrothermal sulfides, the abundances of gold in hydrothermal sulfides collected from intraoceanic arcs and backarc systems are higher than from the midocean ridge systems,furthermore, the gold has high contents in sulfides hosted by the felsic rocks and ultramafic rocks than mafic rocks in the similar tectonic setting. The sphalerite and pyrite generally have higher contents of gold compared to the chalcopyrite, which is characterized by higher precipitation temperatures. The solid solubility limit of gold in pyrite which is the most common sulfide in the Earth’s crust controlled by the contents of arsenic, the concentrations data points of gold and arsenic above the saturated solubility implies that the nanomicro particulates of gold can accumulate in the pyrite structure. Although the gold contents in hydrothermal sulfides are much higher than the hydrothermal metalliferous sediments, the trapping mechanisms of the seafloor hydrothermal sulfides mineralization for gold are low, only a small portion gold is trapped into sulfides and the other may either form particles in the plumes and sediments or dissolve in the seawater. In spite of significant progress in understanding the transport and evolution of gold and the controlling factors in modern seafloor hydrothermal systems, much remains to be done. The futurequantitative research on gold whose major nearfuture challenges are the highprecision in situ and microarea analytical, experimental, and thermodynamic modelling.