Rare Earth on the Mid Pacific floor.

[Anomalocaris]

Great little news blurb here, for anyone who may have missed it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/04/...r_pacific/

I, like the author, love the concept but am unsure of its ability to be a source of these materials. Not exactly low hanging fruit.

And the method that they propose using to extract them is strikingly similar to the method used to extract gold from low-grade ore in Summitville, Colo. ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summitville_mine )

After our marriage in the Colorado mountains, my wife and I went up to the EPA cleanup site of the Summitville Mine. Thinking some group might do that to the whole Pacific Ocean is scary.

The total quantity of rare earth metal ores required by the world is actually fairly small (in the order of tens of thousands of tons a year rather than millions of tons). If the quantity present in sediment is confirmed, only a very small area, say a few square kilometers, needs to be mined to supply the world's demand.

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Guess we might have to add the cost of cleanup to the total cost of extraction eh?

The dirty part of rare earth processing deals mainly with the process of extraction of the metal from the ore, which is the same whether it's on land or at sea.

The process of scouping up large amount of ore containing mud from seafloor may cause other forms of contamination, such as releasing large volume of silt into the water or stir up products of biological decay, but it does not release material into the sea that's not already there.