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posted by chromas on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-the-mother-lode-gives-birth? dept.

Geologists identify deep-earth structures that may signal hidden metal lodes

If the world is to maintain a sustainable economy and fend off the worst effects of climate change, at least one industry will soon have to ramp up dramatically: the mining of metals needed to create a vast infrastructure for renewable power generation, storage, transmission and usage. The problem is, demand for such metals is likely to far outstrip currently both known deposits and the existing technology used to find more ore bodies.

Now, in a new study, scientists have discovered previously unrecognized structural lines 100 miles or more down in the earth that appear to signal the locations of giant deposits of copper, lead, zinc and other vital metals lying close enough to the surface to be mined, but too far down to be found using current exploration methods. The discovery could greatly narrow down search areas, and reduce the footprint of future mines, the authors say. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

[...] The study found that 85 percent of all known base-metal deposits hosted in sediments-and 100 percent of all "giant" deposits (those holding more than 10 million tons of metal)-lie above deeply buried lines girdling the planet that mark the edges of ancient continents. Specifically, the deposits lie along boundaries where the earth's lithosphere-the rigid outermost cladding of the planet, comprising the crust and upper mantle-thins out to about 170 kilometers below the surface.

Up to now, all such deposits have been found pretty much at the surface, and their locations have seemed to be somewhat random. Most discoveries have been made basically by geologists combing the ground and whacking at rocks with hammers. Geophysical exploration methods using gravity and other parameters to find buried ore bodies have entered in recent decades, but the results have been underwhelming. The new study presents geologists with a new, high-tech treasure map telling them where to look.

Journal Reference:
Mark J. Hoggard, Karol Czarnota, Fred D. Richards, et al. Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0593-2)

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:49PM (18 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:49PM (#1015444) Journal

    Wouldn't the "belters" have lots of "rare earth" metals and unobtainium?

    If SpaceX could make the cost of access to space, and the asteroid belt, much cheaper, maybe there would be another gold rush.

    Maybe in the meantime we need to get much better at recycling what we've got.

    But what about people who think it is their right to put the planet's recyclable resources into a landfill -- maybe just out of spite.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:14PM (16 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:14PM (#1015450) Journal

    Asteroid mining could lead to a literal gold rush, since large amounts of gold and other useful elements sank into Earth's core but are potentially abundant and accessible in the Belt.

    Making it economical requires very cheap access to space, which Starship and some other advancements should provide. But there are other factors. Can you get 50+ tons of gold and other metals easily (refined, not raw ore)? Or can you get chunks into Earth orbit, wrap them with some kind of airbag, and safely land them in a desert somewhere (cheaply)? Otherwise you might have to use the materials in space instead of on Earth.

    The mass of the belt is 4% of the Moon's mass (Moon is 1.23% of Earth). And half of that mass is Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea, which should probably be kept intact to use as stations. So you could eventually land *every* smaller asteroid and not affect Earth much.

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:35PM (6 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:35PM (#1015460) Journal

      I wonder if we could develop tech to refine rare metals in space?

      Orbit it much to the sun, collect solar power. But then you have to lift the refined product back to civilization.

      Maybe we could learn to pollute the inner orbits closer to the sun in a way similar to how we've learned to pollute Earth's oceans.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:43PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:43PM (#1015462) Journal

        https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/zaptec-plasma-lightning-pulses-could.html [nextbigfuture.com]

        Something like this would be a good start.

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      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:11PM (4 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:11PM (#1015471)

        You don't have to lift anything. The raw material is very much "up" from here, and most of that "up" is between Earth's surface and orbit.

        Collect solar energy in the belt to refine ores (large mylar "umbrella" parabolic mirrors would melt things nicely), then form the refined products into inert reentry "capsules" and throw them at Earth. You only need about 1km/s delta-V to reach Earth, and with an industrial base and no atmosphere you don't need wasteful rockets, there's lots of far more efficient options. Maybe you strap on some cheap thrusters to fine-tune its trajectory, that'd be especially useful for landing them exactly where you want them.

        When the capsules reach Earth they aerobrake until they fall out of the sky in a blazing fireball shooting for the big bulls-eye you've painted in the middle of nowhere. Without parachutes, etc. they'd have a nasty impact, but you don't really care because they're just raw materials you're about to melt down and turn into something useful anyway.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:02PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:02PM (#1015524)

          With a bit of creativity, you won't even have to refine it in space first. You can use the fireball provided by earth's atmosphere to do some of the melting and splitting for you.

          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @03:54AM (2 children)

            by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 03 2020, @03:54AM (#1015669)

            I'd be willing the bet that most anything that melts during reentry would immediately be blown off the surface by the high airspeed, and either be incinerated in the fireball, or condense and rain down across half a continent.

            Besides, the whole point of refining is to separate out the heavy base metals like iron and nickel so that you only have to ship the valuable ores back to Earth. Reducing the mass of your cargo by 90+% saves a bundle on shipping costs. And all that iron will be immensely useful for building stuff in space, while it's basically worthless on Earth.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 03 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 03 2020, @12:01PM (#1015719) Journal

              I'd be willing the bet that most anything that melts during reentry would immediately be blown off the surface by the high airspeed

              It's worth noting that some meteorites have been ice-cold to the touch right after they've fallen. That's how inefficient the process is at heating the meteorite.

              • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:10PM

                by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 03 2020, @01:10PM (#1015735)

                I'm sure it helps that they come with built-in ablative heat shielding.

                Phase transitions consume an enormous amount of energy - as one example it takes almost as much energy to melt ice without heating it (ice at 0C-> water at 0C = 79cal/g), as to heat the resulting water 100C to the edge of boiling (~100 cal/g). Going from liquid to gas consumes dramatically more energy that both, at 539cal/g.

                I don't know the numbers for rock, but I imagine they're pretty high, and most rock doesn't conduct heat well so all the heat absorbed will tend to be shed by vaporizing the surface rather than heating the layers beneath it. I suspect metallic asteroids would tend to warm up a lot more during reentry since metals conduct heat so much better.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:13PM (6 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:13PM (#1015512)

      A SpaceX Dragon-2 can return 3000 Kg and platinum is running around $27K/kilo so a Dragon capsule full of best case pure platinum ingots would be worth $81M upon landing, and the long term target cost of a Dragon mission was supposed to eventually average $160M. Superficially that's a loss.

      Of course, its hard to really say how much it would cost to cast a strangely shaped ingot that looks and weighs as much as a capsule, in space, and slap a light and cheap retrorocket and guidance package on it.

      Also, pure rhodium runs about $70K per kilo, so assuming the world market could handle the flood, you could run a modest profit off rhodium mining, today, using COTS rocket hardware, assuming you got pure ingots of orbital rhodium for free via robot miners and automated refineries or some such nonsense.

      Most likely, the metal would stay in space and occasionally be used as ballast for landings. Got an extra 100 kilos of re-entry capacity? Here's two million bucks of platinum to take home for the office beer and pizza slush fund.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:05PM (3 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:05PM (#1015527) Journal

        The numbers could improve with a Falcon Heavy (2 boosters and center core landed) and Dragon XL [wikipedia.org]. But Falcon should probably be completely disregarded in favor of Starship, since SpaceX has put out estimates like $2 million for 100-150 tons (100,000-150,000 kg) to LEO (or better [twitter.com]), with the cost multiplied at least a few times to get 100-150 tons to anywhere in the solar system or less mass with extra fuel to spare. If oxygen and methane can be extracted and manufactured at the destination, even better.

        Producing pure ingots of anything at an asteroid sounds difficult. Carrying back 5-50 tons and landing it seems unnecessary. I want to see big asteroid chunks redirected into Earth orbit, and then deorbited with a heat shield [soylentnews.org] and slammed into a desert. As great as using it in space would be, the demand is clearly on Earth's surface for the next couple of centuries at least.

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        • (Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:48PM (2 children)

          by KilroySmith (2113) on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:48PM (#1015535)

          >>> slammed into a desert
          I live in the desert, you insensitive clod!

          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:56PM (1 child)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:56PM (#1015537) Journal

            They'll clear out the area with a nuke [thebulletin.org] first.

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            • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 03 2020, @07:35AM

              by deimtee (3272) on Friday July 03 2020, @07:35AM (#1015694) Journal

              If you really want to clear out some desert, resurrect the real Project Orion. It would not only clear the take-off site for future landings you could deliver an entire asteroid mining facility to the Belt in one go.

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:47PM

        by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 03 2020, @01:47PM (#1015747)

        >Of course, its hard to really say how much it would cost to cast a strangely shaped ingot that looks and weighs as much as a capsule, in space, and slap a light and cheap retrorocket and guidance package on it.

        That's the ticket. Virtually all the cost in a Dragon mission is in the launch and vehicle itself. Landing is very close to free, especially if you don't care about not pulverizing the lander on impact - asteroids do it all the time, and it wouldn't take much to provide a much more controlled reentry.

        Casting reentry capsule shaped ingots should be dirt cheap, and there's lots of really cheap rocket designs to fine-tune the reentry trajectory - things get a lot simpler when you don't require the massive thrust-to-weight ratio needed for launch delta-V. Orbital "tugboats" could also do 99% of the job, assuming capsules are being captured into orbit first for a maximally controlled reentry trajectory, rather than entering Earth space on an atmosphere-skimming direct reentry trajectory.

        Maybe smear some flour paste (or mineral alternative) on the leading surface as well for a cheap ablative heat shield - you don't want half your valuable asteroid burning away and falling as oxide dust along the reentry path. Then just let it slam into the bulls-eye and haul the big now-deformed ingot in for processing.

      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:57PM

        by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 03 2020, @01:57PM (#1015749)

        I'm sure the iron, and probably nickle and other base metals would be left in space. What you'd send to Earth are the valuable metals you extract while purifying the iron, which will be largely useless in space until industrial infrastructure becomes far more sophisticated.

        You can't use launch costs as guideline for the cost to send stuff back to Earth - virtually all of the cost of a Dragon mission is in the vehicle and the launch. The return trip is practically free - no huge first or second stages, and virtually all the acceleration is provided by aerobraking. You don't even need a capsule to land a meteorite, just cast your ingots as nice stable truncated cones and slap a guidance package into it.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:28PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:28PM (#1015516) Journal

      Using the materials in space is better anyway. But that's going to require lots of other technologies, like nearly closed ecosystems...also a good thing.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:04PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:04PM (#1015541) Journal

        I would like that too, but I don't think it will be relevant anytime soon. Even if we have Moon and Mars bases in the 2050s-2080s, they won't need lots of asteroid materials.

        On the other hand, if there is a disruptively cheap way to land useful metals on Earth, that's the way asteroid mining is likely to go. It might even be the environmentally responsible thing to do if it reduces pit mining elsewhere.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:39PM (#1015582)

    Gold Rush?

    Nope. Total annihilation of most metal markets. Even complex alloys will fall in price dramatically, and that cost will be related mostly to fabrication and not materials.

    Once we have lowered the cost to get to space enough, we can transition to the moon. At the moon, we can build automated factories, foundries, and mines. We just need enough supplies of other materials to perform final fabrication in space. The costs of getting materials to Lunar orbit is dramatically lower. So it could be incredibly easy to launch prefab components into Lunar orbit and complete final fabrication there. The very first things we should build are automated craft that could capture small asteroids and bring them back into Lunar orbit. We will learn enough about automated mining on the moon, that automated mining of the asteroid belts will be something were competent at.

    Imagine a steady stream of ore coming into Lunar orbit, where in combination with Lunar sourced products, and expensive products from Earth, are used to create immense structures. If we built something like that, the costs of metal could be lower than the costs of plastic. That's only until they get off their asses and complete automated capturing of hydrocarbons from Titan.

    I think the truth is that would be could be facing a world of incredible abundance, and that useful tool scarcity, will no longer be around to control populations. In fact, I bet that's the reason why it will take as long as it does. Rich people love artificial scarcity and protected markets. There is so much metal in our Solar system, that we could probably give each person on Earth access to unlimited metal for their life times. Imagine recycling and fabrication with metals that cost almost nothing because we brought back millions of tons just in the last quarter.

    The actual costs for quite a few things will transition to labor and other complex components that have a ton of labor built into them. Simple structures that could be automatically built could be incredibly cheap.