Lots of Ink: Japanese team says ocean floor has lots of rare earths. Media say yay – and whoa there, too.
from Daily Yomiuri
It didn’t take time for soaring hopes on exultant news from Japan, on assay of significant rare earth’s elements so vital to 21st century industry in sea floor silt and mud, to fall back to Earth. That doesn’t mean proven wrong, just that the tone relaxed. The rise in caution seems wise – even though common sense suggests that one way or the other, economic forces and the nature of resource extraction mean that China’s present grip on these elements can’t last very long.
The news, formally reported in Nature Geoscience, broke Sunday and Monday and at first, mostly, arrived with little inspection other than what the researchers said of the discovery. This included an almost incredible calculation that one square km of some stretches of seabed could satisfy 20 percent of present global market for rare earths.
It is not possible to cleanly separate these stories by category, but here’s a messy effort anyway.
First Stories, and other enthusiastic versions:
- Mainichi Daily News / Kyodo: Huge rare earth deposits found in deep-sea mud in Pacific ;
- Asahi Shimbun : Harufumi Mori, Dai Narusawa : Solution to the rare earth problem could come from the sea ;
- Yomiuri Shimbun: Abundant rare earth elements found ;
- AFP : Ocean floor contains ’21st-century gold’ ; Calls concentration “extraordinary” and includes context in today’s market, past efforts at ocean mineral extraction.
- Gizmodo – Kat Hannaford: Japan’s Rare Earth Metals Find May Break China’s Stranglehold on Our Gadgets ;
- Reuters – E.L. Tan, Yuko Inoue : Huge rare earth deposits found in Pacific: Japan. Can be readily extracted, it says. REaders really deserve help comprehending the numbers given here – the estimate of 80 to 100 billion tons of the stuff in sea mud, compared to confirmed global reserves on dry land of 110 million tons. That’s three orders of magnitude different. So? How much is estimated to exist in the Earth’s dry surface within 1000 feet of the surface – a LOT more than 110 million tons of recognized reserves. This story’s figures are not meaningfully compared.
- Ars Technica – Scott Johnson: Why ocean mud might matter to your future iPhone.
- PC Magazine – Julius Motal: Japan Discovers Rare Minerals in the Pacific Seabed :
Stories sourced more widely, and more muted:
- Financial Post (via Ottawa Citizen) Peter Koven: Rare earth sea change unlikely ; Mining exects, including those familiar with deep sea minerals, say this’ll take years to research with no guarantee it will be economic in foreseeable future.
- Resource Investor – Gareth Hatch: What’s Up with Rare Earths unde the Pacific Ocean? ; This is a trade newsletter piece, but worth reading. Hatch asks questions that mainstream news editors should be putting to the reporters on this news.
- Forbes – Tim Worstall: Rare Earths, the Japanese discovery ; Worstall appears to be a mining insider. He says this is not ore. It is dirt. And hence economically useless, for now.
- Wall Street.com / Commodities Watch – Paul Ausick: Deep-sea rare Earth Mining Likely a Long Ways Off ;
- CNBC – Donna Burton: Rare Earth, Rare Opportunity? ;
And one that sees problems even if discovery pans out:
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser – Dan Nakaso: Mineral-rich mud stirs environmental fears ; Comes with quite a graphic. Story goes with the easy-development scenario, and gets worried reax from professors wondering how the mining waste will get disposed of, dispersed, pumped, or whatever back to the sea and its floor.
Grist for the Mill: Nature Geoscience paper abstract ;
- Charlie Petit
