r/Futurology • u/ToffeeFever • Sep 10 '23
Energy Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
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u/teachersecret Sep 11 '23
Well... as someone who used to teach chemistry...
Many stars never make lithium in any real quantity - they're turning hydrogen into Helium.
Of the stars that do make lithium, they typically consume most of the lithium, while heavier elements like iron, oxygen, and carbon have a better shot of surviving the supernova explosion required to spread that stuff out and ultimately build a planet out of the remnants.
But, obviously some lithium makes it out of such a stellar explosion, much as it did when a star exploded and left behind the remnants that ultimately became the sun and Earth, and it's still a rather high quantity... but... it's also HIGHLY reactive to water. Guess what you find a lot of on Earth? Over geologic timescales, quite a bit of our lithium reacted with water and became other minerals. It can be extracted from those minerals, but it's in relatively low and spread out quantities.
Chemically speaking, lithium isn't very good at fitting into crystal lattices that are required in rock-forming minerals. This means that the lithium doesn't get locked into those relationships very often, and we end up finding quite a bit of it in pegmatitic minerals and saline brines. You don't really find lithium in feldspar or quarts, so you don't find a ton of it in the crust/rock itself.
Lastly... the surface of the Earth is ever changing. landmasses find themselves subsumed as the tectonic plates move under and above one another. There are chunks of Australian outback that are 4.4 billion years old (roughly moon-aged), but the vast majority of what "was" the upper crust of the Earth has been lost forever to those basic geologic processes. Some elements actually do quite a good job of pushing themselves back up to the surface - like copper leeching into water and being forced back up toward the crust in volcanic processes - but lithium doesn't really lend itself to that process quite as well, typically. That said, this particular lithium filled volcano underwent some interesting and unusual process and some kind of hydrothermal event that brought lithium up and concentrated it there, so this can happen under the right circumstances.