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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: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:20PM (11 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:20PM (#1015453) Journal

    And iron and various metals are mined at less than 1km or 2km. Even rich ore veins are not cost effective to mine deeper down than that. The cost of bringing the ore to the surface becomes more prohibitive as the mines go further down. For the most part they'd rather go sideways than down. If mines are running into economic trouble at 2km, they're really not likely to be profitable in most ways at 150km and deeper, at least not with current methods and mining technologies. Those would be too deep to be even remotely profitable to raise to the surface for now.

    Asteroids and their mining products, on the other hand, can be rolled downhill if they can ever be reached.

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:33PM (10 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:33PM (#1015459) Journal

    Well, I guess we just have to develop new technologies, the horror!

    And besides the process should be fully mechanized, you turn the machine on, and up comes your cobalt or whatever,, so costs aren't really an issue.

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    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:17PM (4 children)

      by Freeman (732) on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:17PM (#1015472) Journal

      Machines break, and there's going to be a lot of breaking when trying to mine something 100km below the ground.

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      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:27PM

        by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:27PM (#1015477) Journal

        And we can build machine that repair themselves, or they can resurface to be repaired by humans. It's still closer than the asteroid belt.

        With mechanization, scarcity is a thing of the past

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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 03 2020, @04:06AM (2 children)

        by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 03 2020, @04:06AM (#1015670) Journal

        The trouble is the temperature. 1500F is a nontrivial materials science problem. That's the temperature where you forge iron, and it's difficult even for tungsten carbide in a nonreducing environment.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:24AM (1 child)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:24AM (#1016366) Journal

          The trouble is the temperature. 1500F is a nontrivial materials science problem.

          Then make it cooler. There's limits to how much heat you could dump on the surface of Earth (generating useful power in the process), but it's pretty high.

          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:43PM

            by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:43PM (#1018192)

            Easier said than done. The challenge is not where do you dump the heat - it's how do you move massive amounts of heat tens to hundreds of miles, fast enough to keep the bit from overheating. The scale of the problem is akin to dropping a fine wire into a scalding hot tub, while keeping the water around the wire frozen.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:32PM (4 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:32PM (#1015517) Journal

      Costs are ALWAYS an issue. If there are no material costs, then there are time costs. (And I don't really see "no material costs" ever happening.)

      Much easier would be greatly improved recycling, and probably even mining the waters of the ocean.

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      • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:58PM (3 children)

        by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:58PM (#1015594) Journal

        Time doesn't matter to the machine doing the work. It just has to produce as fast as we consume.

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Friday July 03 2020, @02:10AM (2 children)

          by shortscreen (2252) on Friday July 03 2020, @02:10AM (#1015628) Journal

          It also needs energy. The premise of TFS was something about building infrastructure for renewable power. If it takes more energy to produce the materials to make the power plant than what the plant itself can produce during its lifetime then it becomes yet another boondoggle.

          • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 03 2020, @02:44AM

            by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday July 03 2020, @02:44AM (#1015646) Journal

            It also needs energy.

            Plenty of that everywhere you look

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:32AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:32AM (#1016369) Journal

            It also needs energy.

            There's huge temperature differentials between the surface and 100 km down. The mining part may well pay for itself energy-wise.