Ocean extracted

Huge deposits of rare minerals, land, essential for the delivery of high-tech electronics products have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and can be easily removed, Japanese researchers said Monday.
"Deposits concentration of heavy rare earths. Only one square kilometer (0.4 square miles) of the deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Tokyo.
The discovery was made a team led by Kato and including scientists from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
They found minerals in the sea mud, extracted from depths of 3,500 to 6,000 meters (11,500-20,000 feet) below the ocean surface at 78 places. One-third of the sites yielded a rich content of rare earth elements and yttrium metals, Kato said in a telephone interview.The fields are in international waters in the space to the east and west of Hawaii and east of Tahiti in French Polynesia, he said.
According to his estimation of rare-earth elements contained in the deposits ranged from 80 to 100 billion tonnes, compared with the world's reserves are currently supported by the U.S. Geological Survey is only 110 million tons, which were found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet Union and the United States.
Details of opening were published Monday in the online version of the British journal Nature Geoscience.
The level of uranium and thorium - a radioactive ingredients that are commonly found in such deposits, which may represent environmental hazards - was one-fifth of these contributions on the ground, said Kato.
Chronic shortage of rare earth elements that are vital to making the spectrum of electronics, magnets and batteries, and encourages them to mining projects in recent years.
China, which accounts for 97 percent of the world's supply of rare earths, it was tightening trading of strategic metals, which caused an explosion in prices. Japan, which accounts for one third of world demand, was stung badly, and was looking to diversify their supply sources, such as heavy rare earth elements such as dysprosium is used in magnets.
Kato said the sea mud was especially rich in the heavier rare earth elements such as gadolinium, lutetium, terbium and dysprosium.
"They used to manufacture flat-screen TVs, LED (light emitting diode) valve and hybrid cars," he said.
Extract fields requires pumping the material from the ocean floor. "Sea mud can be brought to court, and we can extract the rare earth elements at once using a simple acid leach," he said. "The use of dilute acid, the process quickly, and within hours we can get 80-90 percent of rare earths from the mud." Scientists have discovered that the sites are close to Hawaii and Tahiti were particularly rich in rare earths, he said.
He gave no estimate of when the extraction of materials from the seabed can be a start.