PACIFIC OCEAN RARE EARTHS COULD BE PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE TO RECOVER WARN EXPERTS
July 1st, 2011
BY KEITH NUTHALL, DAVE YIN and WANG FANGQING
A GOOD deal of excitement has been created by the announcement this week in the UK academic journal Nature Geoscience that significant deposits of rare earths have been found in the Pacific Ocean floor. A Japanese team, led by Prof Yasuhiro Kato, of the University of Tokyo, measured more than 2,000 seafloor sediments, sampled at depth intervals of around one metre, at 78 sites covering a large part of the Pacific Ocean, especially near Hawaii and Tahiti. They claim the ocean-floor reserves could total 80 to 100 ...
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