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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)

-- submitted from IRC


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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.

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