8 ms·

The potential of deep-sea mud as a source of rare-earth elements (2018)

51 points by weregiraffe 8y ago

robinduckett 8y ago
Yes, let's anger Poseidon. That's a good idea.
sanqui 8y ago
I wonder what would be the impact of any mining operations on deep sea wildlife. The article doesn't seem to discuss this.
- forestdev1 8y ago
  same here, it seems pretty obvious to me that should be a major concern.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Lots of people would disagree. We'll never see that wildlife, and its survival or demise has no effect on us or anything we do see.
    - ovx99 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Unless you want to eat fish.
      - Arnt 8y ago
        There isn't much fish in the deep sea. There's a lot of fish (and other animals) in the top four meters, a lot of others in the forty meters below that, and somewhat less in the layer below that, but once you get to kilometers of depth things change. There are many species still, but fewer individuals of each species. Life also slows down — animals down there grow slowly and reproduce late. I personally don't like to mine down there. We should make our mess where we can get to it, and can clean up any problems. But conflicts with fish aren't likely to be a big problem. Driving some rare species into extinction, perhaps releasing a bunch of contaminants where we can't clean up and don't know where they will flow, yes, both of those, but not conflicts with the rich fisheries near the surface.
        moh_maya 8y ago
        Not really. Deep sea mining on the floor will kick up sediments, that will probably affect growth of plankton, which form one of the foundations of the ocean ecosystem. Also related to what I've quoted below, you'll probably end up releasing a lot of minerals into the ocean water that drive algal blooms. "Bottom trawling also stirs up the sediment at the bottom of the sea. The resulting undersea plumes of “suspended solids” can drift with the current for tens of miles from the source of the trawling, introducing turbidity throughout the water that inhibits the transfer of light down to the depths where it is needed for photosynthesis in plankton, sea kelp and other undersea plants that serve as the basis for the marine food chain. Also, ocean sediments serve as natural safe resting places for many persistent organic pollutants (such as DDT and PCBs). Dredging these sediments up effectively reintroduces such toxins into the water where they are unwittingly absorbed and consumed by the fish we eat and other marine life already trying to cope with otherwise compromised undersea habitats. The sediment plumes also reintroduce nutrient solids from agricultural and other practices, increasing demand for oxygen in the water (causing algae blooms) and contributing to the outbreak of ocean “dead zones” devoid of marine life." [1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/saving-deep-ocean-species/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/saving-deep-ocean...
        jessaustin 8y ago
        The link is talking about damaging coral. Coral requires sunlight. I'm not sure what they mean by "deep sea", but if it's got sunlight it's not what's under discussion here. They're not pulling valuable fish species like tuna out of the hadal zone. It's confusing, to countenance the current abuses like those described in that link but use them to criticize a completely unrelated activity.
        pvaldes 8y ago
        Not all coral species need light. There are "coral forests" adapted to cold waters. Lophelia builds "deep-water briars" there. They are super-mega-slow growing. And of course there are comercial species of very expensive yummy crustaceans living there. A couple of trawls and all is lost for the next thousands of years.
      - ForHackernews 8y ago
        My understanding is fish stocks are already depleted and will be further devastated by climate change[0]. Human diets in the future will necessarily include much less fish. [0] In yesterday's NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-cli... "A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years."
        tokai 8y ago
        That is my understanding as well. This study[0] estimate that the worlds oceans have lost 2/3 biomass of predatory fish in the last century. It's really disturbing. [0]https://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m512p155.pdf https://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m512p155.pdf
    - moh_maya 8y ago
      So I don't know if you are being sarcastic or if you are being matter of fact. But I'd wager that disrupting deep sea floors would have detrimental effects on a) commerical fishing, since you are disrupting the ocean ecosystem in a big way b) probably accelerate global warming by leading to CO2 release from carbon sequestered on the floor [1] The first point is easy to explain to anyone, even if they don't believe in anthropogenic climate change and refuse to see the dangers implied by the 2nd.. [1] https://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/carbon/6a.html https://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/carbon/6a.html
    - Iv 8y ago
      This is our immortality we are discounting for a fistful of resources. Sequencing previously unknown sea life has allowed us to find 6 of the 13 genes we need to get rid of mitochondria, a necessary step in preventing cells aging. (Longer, more detailed version) Early in our evolutionary history, when we were still unicellular organisms, we absorbed another life form that came to live in symbiosis with us. Mitochondrion are like cells inside our cells. They reproduce and are transmitted through the mother. They code for a few proteins we need to survive. Their malfunctions is believed to play a role in some degenerative diseases such as Parkinson or Alzheimer. Unfortunately, they did not evolve the same complex self-repair mechanisms that our nucleus did. A lot of factors cause mitochondrial DNA to degrade. This gave an evolutionary incentive to find ways for the nucleus to encode genes for similar proteins so that less functions may be impaired by mitochondrial development. It can't be the same gene though, for reasons that are a bit complicated. As a summary let's say that the membrane of mitochondrion is easier to cross that the one of the nucleus, so you need a kind of shape hack to get it through. Imagine that you are asked to copy a vehicle, but the copy also has to be able to unfold in a way that allows through to go through a manhole. Not trivial. Luckily, the pressure to find these genetic recipes exists in all the eukaryote domain, which includes all the animals and the plans (and a few other things). That includes a huge number of organisms that we have never sequences or even named. Recipes that work for their nucleus has a good chance of being able to work with ours. So far we found recipes for 6 of the 13 genes we need, but every time a species disappear without us being able to check for these, we may be kissing our ticket to eternity goodbye. These 13 genes are vital, but I must also add that every gene in living organisms is a recipe for a useful molecule. Remember that spider silk has a higher tensile strength than steel, and that we know next to nothing about organisms that survive in high pressure environments. Killing species for short-term resources is as dumb as uncovering an encyclopedia written by advanced aliens and burning it for heat. Could we somehow find these genes through simulation? Unlikely. The protein folding problem is a n-body problem and a billion years of evolution did not find a smarter way than brute force to solve it. And by the way, it ran a brute force algorithm on a billion year in a lab the size of a planet. Realize the incredible value of this rainbow table. Really, even if we do not care at all about biodiversity on the philosophical level, we should care about it on a very egoistical level. It is likely to be the most precious thing our planet contains: solution to uncomputable problems.
- T-A 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#Environmental_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#Environmental_...
- aerophilic 8y ago
  So this is indeed a major concern. The main governing body for this type of work is the international seabed authority: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authori... A hot area they have looked at is the longing of poly metallic nodules: http://www.eu-midas.net/science/nodules http://www.eu-midas.net/science/nodules While no one has actually started mining operations yet, they are working in that direction, trying to get ahead of the environmental impacts first and foremost. While there is a strong argument for “protecting” the environment, I don’t see that as a justification in it if itself to not do resource extraction. While not perfect, they seem to be heading toward a conservative approach to mining. In it (at least last I heard) they are deliberately setting aside large swaths of areas with the valuable resource as “wildlife reserves” similar to what we do in the United States, and Australia is going for the Great Barrier Reef. I don’t know the future here, but there are too many people in this planet clamoring for resources not to look at all options (though personally I would prefer to enable space mining).
- pvaldes 8y ago
  That would just distroy it but they are invisible to most people. Benthic ecosystems are fragile. They depend a lot on silt size and currents.
- drugme 8y ago
  The fact that the authors don't (when they surely must be aware) makes you wonder if they're on the take somehow. Or have been pressured into silence.
  - zenexer 8y ago
    If you click on the authors' names, you'll get enough info to roughly determine their areas of expertise. Based on a few names I clicked, it sounds as though they're focused more on brainstorming potential solutions for energy and resource shortages than evaluating the environmental impacts of those solutions. They'll probably leave the latter part to their peers who are more qualified to make such assessments. There's no argument that environment impact needs to be evaluated--that's just not what these particular people are qualified to assess. It's unlikely that the entirety of academia will avoid discussing the potential consequences of these ideas. Those who are qualified to do so will.
okket 8y ago
I'm no expert, but is lifting stuff from the deep sea not exorbitantly expensive? The word 'costs' does only appear twice in the article, and there it talks only about potential reducing costs by separating the mud with a hydrocyclone (1) on the sea floor... (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocyclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocyclone
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Mining is also quite expensive. Conceptually, the process for lifting from the deep ocean is quite a bit simpler: attach the load to an airtight bag, and release a little bit of air into the bag. The load will float to the surface. There would still be a process involved in getting compressed air to the deep, but it might be simpler than boring holes in the earth. Of course, it's still likely that the costs involved mean this idea wouldn't work in today's market conditions. That doesn't mean that conditions would never change...
  - Retric 8y ago
    Quite a bit of mining involves picking stuff up off the ground. The worldwide mining industry is surprisingly small due to it’s high efficiency. Across all materials from coal, diamonds, salt, copper, etc it all adds up to just ~600billion per year in revenue and profit margins that jump all over the pace from year to year. PS: Rare earth minerals are also generally discarded. It’s the effort to remove them from ore that’s the issue not finding them.
eponeponepon 8y ago
This has a slight air of the manganese nodule seabed mining that was propagated as cover for the Glomar Explorer expedition...
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  This. Other than incremental improvements in deep sea drilling I can't read an article about deep sea resource extraction and take it seriously. There will forever be a voice in the back of my head telling me it's just a CIA cover story.
- MarkSummer 8y ago
  Ha, agree. This is an amazing story if you haven't read about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian The kind of thing that kind of makes you second guess the "whacky" conspiracy crackpots.
- PavlikPaja 8y ago
  They actually exist thought, they just weren't worth mining.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sillyquiet 8y ago
nah, let's go hunt for rare-earth elements left over from the creation of the solar system out where we aren't in danger of stressing an already stressed ecosystem. Let's pay the tremendous up-front costs of lifting mining operations out and reap the long (caveat: very long) term benefits of doing so. edit: In case that came across as sarcasm, I am in dead earnest. Whatever the relative costs of so-called asteroid mining versus deep sea mining, the ecological cost tips the balance waaay in the favor of asteroid mining. It's just that we'd have to have a longer-term mindset than we currently do.
- jyounker 8y ago
  The dinosaurs tried to do that by bringing the Chicxulub asteroid into Earth orbit for easy mining. Look how that turned out.
  - sillyquiet 8y ago
    And then became petroleum! COINCIDENCE? seriously, whatever the (overstated, imo) danger of moving mass into Earth orbit is, it can be mitigated - and probably a lot more easily than the dangers of deep sea drilling can be.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  Just for the sake of discussion, I'll say that sending anything into space also creates a lot of pollution on Earth (just think about all the energy necessary to build and power our rockets). Mining asteroids would still have an ecological impact - higher, lower, I don't know. But something to keep in mind.
  - sillyquiet 8y ago
    This is very true, but my thinking is that cost is almost all front-loaded - once we get equipment up there to accomplish the mining, the launches in support would not be terribly frequent, I think, right?
    - 8y ago
jayalpha 8y ago
Peak-a-Boo https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/05/rare-earth-depletion-non-solution-for.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/05/rare-earth-depl...
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Pretty cool, but worth noting that most rare-earths aren't actually that rare and supply shortages tend to be because of the long delay in ramping up mine production. We aren't close to running out of any metals/minerals the last I heard. I'd be interested in seeing the economics of mining this mud compared to more traditional methods.
- tzfld 8y ago
  I'd be more interested to see how economy reacts if a massively used resource going to be depleted.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    We've been getting warned about reaching peak oil / diminishing oil production, but so far that hasn't happened yet as far as I know (that moment has been postponed again because of the highly destructive fracking process)

51 points by weregiraffe 8y ago

Yes, let's anger Poseidon. That's a good idea.

I wonder what would be the impact of any mining operations on deep sea wildlife. The article doesn't seem to discuss this.

forestdev1 8y ago
same here, it seems pretty obvious to me that should be a major concern.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Lots of people would disagree. We'll never see that wildlife, and its survival or demise has no effect on us or anything we do see.
  - ovx99 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Unless you want to eat fish.
    - Arnt 8y ago
      There isn't much fish in the deep sea. There's a lot of fish (and other animals) in the top four meters, a lot of others in the forty meters below that, and somewhat less in the layer below that, but once you get to kilometers of depth things change. There are many species still, but fewer individuals of each species. Life also slows down — animals down there grow slowly and reproduce late. I personally don't like to mine down there. We should make our mess where we can get to it, and can clean up any problems. But conflicts with fish aren't likely to be a big problem. Driving some rare species into extinction, perhaps releasing a bunch of contaminants where we can't clean up and don't know where they will flow, yes, both of those, but not conflicts with the rich fisheries near the surface.
      - moh_maya 8y ago
        Not really. Deep sea mining on the floor will kick up sediments, that will probably affect growth of plankton, which form one of the foundations of the ocean ecosystem. Also related to what I've quoted below, you'll probably end up releasing a lot of minerals into the ocean water that drive algal blooms. "Bottom trawling also stirs up the sediment at the bottom of the sea. The resulting undersea plumes of “suspended solids” can drift with the current for tens of miles from the source of the trawling, introducing turbidity throughout the water that inhibits the transfer of light down to the depths where it is needed for photosynthesis in plankton, sea kelp and other undersea plants that serve as the basis for the marine food chain. Also, ocean sediments serve as natural safe resting places for many persistent organic pollutants (such as DDT and PCBs). Dredging these sediments up effectively reintroduces such toxins into the water where they are unwittingly absorbed and consumed by the fish we eat and other marine life already trying to cope with otherwise compromised undersea habitats. The sediment plumes also reintroduce nutrient solids from agricultural and other practices, increasing demand for oxygen in the water (causing algae blooms) and contributing to the outbreak of ocean “dead zones” devoid of marine life." [1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/saving-deep-ocean-species/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/saving-deep-ocean...
        jessaustin 8y ago
        The link is talking about damaging coral. Coral requires sunlight. I'm not sure what they mean by "deep sea", but if it's got sunlight it's not what's under discussion here. They're not pulling valuable fish species like tuna out of the hadal zone. It's confusing, to countenance the current abuses like those described in that link but use them to criticize a completely unrelated activity.
        pvaldes 8y ago
        Not all coral species need light. There are "coral forests" adapted to cold waters. Lophelia builds "deep-water briars" there. They are super-mega-slow growing. And of course there are comercial species of very expensive yummy crustaceans living there. A couple of trawls and all is lost for the next thousands of years.
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      My understanding is fish stocks are already depleted and will be further devastated by climate change[0]. Human diets in the future will necessarily include much less fish. [0] In yesterday's NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-cli... "A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years."
      - tokai 8y ago
        That is my understanding as well. This study[0] estimate that the worlds oceans have lost 2/3 biomass of predatory fish in the last century. It's really disturbing. [0]https://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m512p155.pdf https://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m512p155.pdf
  - moh_maya 8y ago
    So I don't know if you are being sarcastic or if you are being matter of fact. But I'd wager that disrupting deep sea floors would have detrimental effects on a) commerical fishing, since you are disrupting the ocean ecosystem in a big way b) probably accelerate global warming by leading to CO2 release from carbon sequestered on the floor [1] The first point is easy to explain to anyone, even if they don't believe in anthropogenic climate change and refuse to see the dangers implied by the 2nd.. [1] https://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/carbon/6a.html https://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/carbon/6a.html
  - Iv 8y ago
    This is our immortality we are discounting for a fistful of resources. Sequencing previously unknown sea life has allowed us to find 6 of the 13 genes we need to get rid of mitochondria, a necessary step in preventing cells aging. (Longer, more detailed version) Early in our evolutionary history, when we were still unicellular organisms, we absorbed another life form that came to live in symbiosis with us. Mitochondrion are like cells inside our cells. They reproduce and are transmitted through the mother. They code for a few proteins we need to survive. Their malfunctions is believed to play a role in some degenerative diseases such as Parkinson or Alzheimer. Unfortunately, they did not evolve the same complex self-repair mechanisms that our nucleus did. A lot of factors cause mitochondrial DNA to degrade. This gave an evolutionary incentive to find ways for the nucleus to encode genes for similar proteins so that less functions may be impaired by mitochondrial development. It can't be the same gene though, for reasons that are a bit complicated. As a summary let's say that the membrane of mitochondrion is easier to cross that the one of the nucleus, so you need a kind of shape hack to get it through. Imagine that you are asked to copy a vehicle, but the copy also has to be able to unfold in a way that allows through to go through a manhole. Not trivial. Luckily, the pressure to find these genetic recipes exists in all the eukaryote domain, which includes all the animals and the plans (and a few other things). That includes a huge number of organisms that we have never sequences or even named. Recipes that work for their nucleus has a good chance of being able to work with ours. So far we found recipes for 6 of the 13 genes we need, but every time a species disappear without us being able to check for these, we may be kissing our ticket to eternity goodbye. These 13 genes are vital, but I must also add that every gene in living organisms is a recipe for a useful molecule. Remember that spider silk has a higher tensile strength than steel, and that we know next to nothing about organisms that survive in high pressure environments. Killing species for short-term resources is as dumb as uncovering an encyclopedia written by advanced aliens and burning it for heat. Could we somehow find these genes through simulation? Unlikely. The protein folding problem is a n-body problem and a billion years of evolution did not find a smarter way than brute force to solve it. And by the way, it ran a brute force algorithm on a billion year in a lab the size of a planet. Realize the incredible value of this rainbow table. Really, even if we do not care at all about biodiversity on the philosophical level, we should care about it on a very egoistical level. It is likely to be the most precious thing our planet contains: solution to uncomputable problems.
T-A 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#Environmental_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#Environmental_...
aerophilic 8y ago
So this is indeed a major concern. The main governing body for this type of work is the international seabed authority: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Seabed_Authori... A hot area they have looked at is the longing of poly metallic nodules: http://www.eu-midas.net/science/nodules http://www.eu-midas.net/science/nodules While no one has actually started mining operations yet, they are working in that direction, trying to get ahead of the environmental impacts first and foremost. While there is a strong argument for “protecting” the environment, I don’t see that as a justification in it if itself to not do resource extraction. While not perfect, they seem to be heading toward a conservative approach to mining. In it (at least last I heard) they are deliberately setting aside large swaths of areas with the valuable resource as “wildlife reserves” similar to what we do in the United States, and Australia is going for the Great Barrier Reef. I don’t know the future here, but there are too many people in this planet clamoring for resources not to look at all options (though personally I would prefer to enable space mining).
pvaldes 8y ago
That would just distroy it but they are invisible to most people. Benthic ecosystems are fragile. They depend a lot on silt size and currents.
drugme 8y ago
The fact that the authors don't (when they surely must be aware) makes you wonder if they're on the take somehow. Or have been pressured into silence.
- zenexer 8y ago
  If you click on the authors' names, you'll get enough info to roughly determine their areas of expertise. Based on a few names I clicked, it sounds as though they're focused more on brainstorming potential solutions for energy and resource shortages than evaluating the environmental impacts of those solutions. They'll probably leave the latter part to their peers who are more qualified to make such assessments. There's no argument that environment impact needs to be evaluated--that's just not what these particular people are qualified to assess. It's unlikely that the entirety of academia will avoid discussing the potential consequences of these ideas. Those who are qualified to do so will.

okket 8y ago

I'm no expert, but is lifting stuff from the deep sea not exorbitantly expensive? The word 'costs' does only appear twice in the article, and there it talks only about potential reducing costs by separating the mud with a hydrocyclone (1) on the sea floor... (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocyclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocyclone

jessaustin 8y ago
Mining is also quite expensive. Conceptually, the process for lifting from the deep ocean is quite a bit simpler: attach the load to an airtight bag, and release a little bit of air into the bag. The load will float to the surface. There would still be a process involved in getting compressed air to the deep, but it might be simpler than boring holes in the earth. Of course, it's still likely that the costs involved mean this idea wouldn't work in today's market conditions. That doesn't mean that conditions would never change...
- Retric 8y ago
  Quite a bit of mining involves picking stuff up off the ground. The worldwide mining industry is surprisingly small due to it’s high efficiency. Across all materials from coal, diamonds, salt, copper, etc it all adds up to just ~600billion per year in revenue and profit margins that jump all over the pace from year to year. PS: Rare earth minerals are also generally discarded. It’s the effort to remove them from ore that’s the issue not finding them.

eponeponepon 8y ago

This has a slight air of the manganese nodule seabed mining that was propagated as cover for the Glomar Explorer expedition...

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
This. Other than incremental improvements in deep sea drilling I can't read an article about deep sea resource extraction and take it seriously. There will forever be a voice in the back of my head telling me it's just a CIA cover story.
MarkSummer 8y ago
Ha, agree. This is an amazing story if you haven't read about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian The kind of thing that kind of makes you second guess the "whacky" conspiracy crackpots.
PavlikPaja 8y ago
They actually exist thought, they just weren't worth mining.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sillyquiet 8y ago

nah, let's go hunt for rare-earth elements left over from the creation of the solar system out where we aren't in danger of stressing an already stressed ecosystem. Let's pay the tremendous up-front costs of lifting mining operations out and reap the long (caveat: very long) term benefits of doing so. edit: In case that came across as sarcasm, I am in dead earnest. Whatever the relative costs of so-called asteroid mining versus deep sea mining, the ecological cost tips the balance waaay in the favor of asteroid mining. It's just that we'd have to have a longer-term mindset than we currently do.

jyounker 8y ago
The dinosaurs tried to do that by bringing the Chicxulub asteroid into Earth orbit for easy mining. Look how that turned out.
- sillyquiet 8y ago
  And then became petroleum! COINCIDENCE? seriously, whatever the (overstated, imo) danger of moving mass into Earth orbit is, it can be mitigated - and probably a lot more easily than the dangers of deep sea drilling can be.
danmaz74 8y ago
Just for the sake of discussion, I'll say that sending anything into space also creates a lot of pollution on Earth (just think about all the energy necessary to build and power our rockets). Mining asteroids would still have an ecological impact - higher, lower, I don't know. But something to keep in mind.
- sillyquiet 8y ago
  This is very true, but my thinking is that cost is almost all front-loaded - once we get equipment up there to accomplish the mining, the launches in support would not be terribly frequent, I think, right?
  - 8y ago

jayalpha 8y ago

Peak-a-Boo https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/05/rare-earth-depletion-non-solution-for.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/05/rare-earth-depl...

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Pretty cool, but worth noting that most rare-earths aren't actually that rare and supply shortages tend to be because of the long delay in ramping up mine production. We aren't close to running out of any metals/minerals the last I heard. I'd be interested in seeing the economics of mining this mud compared to more traditional methods.

tzfld 8y ago
I'd be more interested to see how economy reacts if a massively used resource going to be depleted.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  We've been getting warned about reaching peak oil / diminishing oil production, but so far that hasn't happened yet as far as I know (that moment has been postponed again because of the highly destructive fracking process)