 Thank you John So You'll have to forgive me a little bit for this first overly dramatic slide But when Sally Benson approached me about talking to you today It was largely because she'd seen some Coverage that we got for some work that we'd been our group had been doing here at Stanford in the press about our work in Nevada And Oregon and Idaho where we had discovered that there were larger concentrations and more places where you could find lithium than people had appreciated before and through the clever work of the PR people in The school of her sciences this went to AP and went around and it was covered widely internationally and many of the Articles like this more or less got the drift that we were finding places. There were more places than we'd realized To find lithium others were sort of cringe worthy Like this one which either attributed us sort of magical powers That we were going to pull materials out of super volcanoes or magical powers to the super volcanoes themselves And then the other thing that really bugged me about these is both of these pictures were not Pictures of proper super volcanoes which just offended my geological sense So this is the more modest title of the paper that we Published and I just want to acknowledge up front that this is Tom Benson and this work was largely he was the lead on this It was a chapter in his thesis and he's been Greatly rewarded for this work. He was hired after he graduated by Lithium America given a large signing bonus and a huge exploration Budget and he's now traveling the world going around looking for lithium and it makes me wish I was 40 years younger 40 pounds lighter and two knees better and I would have loved to have done that myself This is Jim right to us Danford grad who for the last 40 years has been working on sort of non-traditional Mineralization in the US and then here is Matt cobalt who also was a grad student of mine that worked on some of these caldera's That I'll be talking about today, and he's now a research scientist in our secondary iron Microprobe lab at Stanford Okay, so Despite the sort of crazy coverage that we got I was very pleased to see that some of the sort of basic science work That we'd been doing in the last Decade working on the whoops, excuse me Got yeah, there we go Working on the Columbia River basalts and the Rialytic Volcanic eruptions that are associated with the Yellowstone hot spot or hot spot track here that is now Centered underneath Yellowstone flood basalts are really extraordinarily large eruptions That erupt over a very short period of time maybe only hundreds of thousands of years millions of cubic kilometers of basalt an Individual lava flow as some of these larger provinces would release as much CO2 as we burn in fossil fuels in a year and One of the larger one of these here in the Siberian traps is Responsible for the largest extinction in earth history at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago and this was caused by the CO2 and sulfur that was emitted by these and also as the basalt came Through the crust it deep stabilized carbonate rocks and evaporates it contributed more sulfur burned coal beds and This led to a gigantic extinction Also, the dinosaurs may have suffered a sort of double whammy that at about the same time a big bolide Smackdown on earth and Yucatan Peninsula. There were also eruptions In here in India called the Deccan area and they may have also suffered sort of a double blow from this In contrast, I sort of refer to the Columbia River basalts as the friendly basalt Flood basalts and that's because they're much smaller in volume So the amount of CO2 that they emitted just kind of made the middle of the myosin 16 million years ago Kind of balmy and so it's actually called in the geologic record the middle myosin climatic optimum and so our Research has largely been focused on the start of that volcanism and the start of the Yellowstone hotspot And this is a model that sort of explains how this happens that if you Have a plume that comes up and rises through the mantle as this material rises It decompresses and starts to melt and it melts in a huge extent here to produce flood basalts And then as the tectonic plate passes over the top of it this sort of tail behind the initial Arrival of the head of the plume gives a tail that as the Plate goes over you get a trail of volcanoes and this is exactly what we see in Hawaii Where the volcanoes get older and older and the hotspot is actually here right here Underneath this little Luigi C. Mount net here now That's what happens when you have a hotspot under an ocean But what I'm interested in is what happens when you have a hotspot under a continent and in that case what happens is that the basalt comes in it intersects Continental crust which melts at a much lower temperature maybe 700 degrees and so it melts to form rhyolites and This just is shown here in that this is the track of as North America moved across the Tail of that hotspot you basically kind of you can think of it like a Bunsen burner that it burned its way through the crust And so we go from 16 to 14 to 12 to 10 million years to now underneath Yellowstone It's sitting that is Yellowstone is sitting right on the Bunsen burner of the hotspot tail right now now when we talk about Magmas and erupting their physical properties the shapes of the volcanoes and the explosivity of the eruptions are mostly a function of viscosity and Rhyolites because they have a lot of silica in them and they're lower in temperature are much more viscous than the typical Eruptions you've seen of Hawaiian basalts flowing downhill many orders of magnitude More viscous they also contain a lot more water in the magmas with the result that when those magmas rise towards the surface And eventually it reaches the point where it saturates with respect to those volatiles Those volatiles come out of solution form bubbles and they begin to expand but because the magma is so slow to deform in Rhyolites you can get very large pressures and so sort of similarly to Analogous to if we pop the bottle of champagne where we suddenly allow abruptly CO2 to come out of solution in the champagne The same thing if you do that to a large volume of Rhyolite produces a super eruption and as vulcanologists we can Categorize explosive eruptions kind of the same way we do with with earthquakes on a scale of volcanic Explosivity index of zero to eight It's a log scale just like earthquakes are and the kinds of calderas that are centers I'm going to talk about today rank six through eight on these kinds of scale and just for comparison the Mount St Helen's 1980 eruption was a magnitude five the IAEI Yoko eruption that in Iceland that shut down all the airports in Europe for a while was a magnitude This one was a magnitude four so super volcanoes technically are those where you have an eruption of a thousand cubic kilometers of magma over a period of Hours to it most days Now these huge volumes of magma result in high convective columns that can reach 10 20 30 40 kilometers into above the Vent and this means that you get into the stratosphere and that means that the ash that gets up there and the gases that it takes up Or capable of being transported by high elevation winds and you can actually have effects on climate Sometimes those eruption columns collapse and flow away under the force of gravity And then you have essentially an avalanche of hot pumice and ash Maybe 600 degrees sea that moves at hundreds of kilometers an hour And destroys everything in its path and here's the Stratospheric winds can move this material. So this is an example of the latest two big eruptions in North America one from Yellowstone Spread ash here and another one in eastern, California That spread ash here and just for comparison. Here's the little pipsqueak of Mount st. Helens in 1980 Now if you take hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of magma out from underneath the Out of a magma chamber Basically, what you do is you remove Support for the roof of the magma chamber and so what happens is the roof falls in so in contrast other kinds of volcanoes These super eruption volcanoes are not whoops are not like pointy things like this is my own That which is actually erupting these days instead. They're actually kind of they're not kind of they are big holes in the ground Big circular holes in the ground and this is a 20 to 30 kilometer hole in the ground that formed 767,000 years ago if any of you ever skied on Mammoth Mountain If you've ever skied that's it and you're looking across the caldera from that eruption That caldera can then fill with water Forming a caldera lake like this one at Crater Lake in Oregon and eventually that lake can partially fill with sentiments and with Lavas now calderas Formed by these super eruptions have features that make some really good hosts for or formation one is that the caldera lakes accumulate volcanic ash and Ashy sediments materials that by virtue of being glassy are not stable in the weathering environment and By virtue of their fine grain size are easily leached and altered Also, they have a lot of structures in them that are due to the initial inflation of the magma chamber that Breaks the rocks and faults like that and then when you Allow the magma chamber to collapse after the big eruption you get another set of faults And if you reinflate it with post-calder eruptions you get more faults so this is an example of a sandbox model model of Putting a balloon under this and sort of showing the kinds of fractures that form the point is is you have lots of fractures And so there's a wonderful opportunity for fluids to flow around in the crust and that's usually Cat required before you get more deposits and finally you have abundant heat you have heat from the magma chamber That's left behind You have heat that might be added to that magma chamber afterwards you have heat from Lavas That erupt along dykes and here and it's these this heat of the magma chamber and things coming up along the fractures that bound the caldera that drive hydrothermal circulation and promote Alteration of the ash deposits in the lake sediments and so it's long been known that as shown by this old model from Silatone bottom in 1984 that these are Good places to find or deposits of gold and silver and base metal mineralization, but there also we think good places to look for energy critical elements and by that I mean elements that are critical to one or more of energy related technology such as solar panels or wind turbines or electrical vehicles and We can express this in what's called a criticality matrix This is from a DOE study in 2011 where basically you plot the importance of any particular element for all of these fancy new Technologies versus the supply risk and the supply risk is really how diverse The sources of the raw material are so if we don't have any US sources for it It obviously has a very high supply risk or if the sources in foreign countries are Unfriendly or politically unstable or if they're just in one country and for example the one we mostly have problems with Nowadays as many of our sources of things are in China And so that creates a problem. So this was in 2011 and it shows Lithium here as being in what it calls near critical whereas rare earth elements Which China has the market cornered on essentially are Considered critical now since 2011 the world has actually changed a little bit With the fact that we have greater use of lithium batteries to power all of our Digital devices we have it now for storage batteries We also use it to run tools and of course the big thing is the development of Electrical hybrids and fully electrical Vehicles so you can see that this is a plot of the price per ton for lithium that took a jump at the time We brought in cell phones and then there's another one that came in when we started seeing more and more Electric vehicles and of course this is accelerated in the last few years with many Automotive companies saying they're going to shift towards Electrical vehicles and this is just showing what the anticipated Number of electrical vehicles are in the US China Japan and Europe from about 1 million now to in 2030 to something like 25 million So if we look at what a Tesla has in it There's this huge battery pack of which Actually only 15 pounds of it is lithium right here That's about the weight of a bowling ball But you're going to need 25 million bowling balls just to make the cars that we're going to want We anticipate having and that doesn't count all the other things like big storage batteries And other things so this probably means that lithium is increasingly moving towards the Criticality corner because it's becoming more and more important So let's look at global lithium resources and reserves So what we see here resources are just kind of very Dreamy estimates of how much we think is out there. It's not the same thing as proved reserves It's resources are kind of what we get to make from the geology and what you can see right away Is that the big ones here? This is a log scale are in Chile Argentina and Bolivia or what sometimes called the lithium Triangle where these are in salators our brine deposits and you can see that all these others are smaller resources And but more critical in this is this is the 2015 lithium production in kilotons and what you can see is the United States is just barely off of the zero line Most countries are still on the zero line. So the biggest producers are Argentina Chile and Australia and if we compare that to the amount of The resources of the various types of clay pegmatite and brines This is are there what we think are for sure the reserves which are a lot less than what the sort of airy-fairy resources are and this is our range of estimates for total global lithium consumption It's a wide range if it's down here. We're good if it's up here. We're not so good So let's look at the three types of lithium deposits There's pegmatites, which are coarse-grained granitic rocks and exposures of deep levels of the continental crust And then there are brines that are saline ground water in closed basins that are surrounded by lithium-rich volcanic rocks in arid climates where you can promote evaporation and then finally clays which are the ones we've been working on in sedimentary rocks and closed basins that are also surrounded by lithium-rich volcanic rocks So pegmatites are small but mighty They're small deposits, but they're high grade typically things like 1% weight percent because they have minerals like spodium In and Lepidomat like Micas and here's a little Home Depot bucket You can see these individual crystals of spodium in they're really Gigantic and these pegmatites and easy to get out. They're relatively benign Environmentally, they're not hard to mine the metallurgy is easy and it was pegmatites which were the main source In through the 20th century for lithium when it was mostly used for ceramics and glass lubricating greases and a variety of manufacturing Things so this is the most productive lithium mine in the world so Open pit mine and a pegmatite in Australia and these are the the big spodiuming crystals that are found in that Second we have brines and these as I said are these saline ground waters this is the salar de atacama and Chile and There are a bunch of these salars or plias full of water that are in this area of overlap between Chile Bolivia and Argentina or the so-called lithium triangle So just some pictures of so the salar de atacama the huge brine evaporation ponds they you drill down extract brines from shallow groundwater and then put it in these basically man-made plias to allow the Sun to evaporate it until you Precipitate lithium carbonate in the US the lithium brine resources are in a little bit different setting in that they're basically whoops in Basins that are formed Here in the basin and range province of the United States where the continental crust is being extended and What this does is create? Basins and ranges basins and ranges hence the name of the area and As those fill up sediments accumulate there and so for example, this is the black rock plia It was an example of these in there now when you're talking about basin and range That means that Nevada is one of is basically all in the basin and range and so Nevada is really the home of lithium in North America and It is this is the brine evaporation ponds at the Silver Peak mine in Clayton Valley, which is located here and This Silver Peak mine is the only lithium mine that's currently operational in the United States and it produces 4% of the annual production of lithium carbonate And in this geologic cross-section you can see the ore grades there if the brines that are found in altered volcanic rocks Which are on the order of 40 to? 320 ppm lithium and this is compared to the brines that are taken out of the Salar de Atacama Which are much much richer in lithium? Presumably because the evaporation is much greater in that very dry area Then finally are the clays and the clays are kind of analogous in the sense that they're they're they're sort of paired with the brine deposits in the sense that What happens is that in some places near faults where hot fluids come up Lithium instead of going down and in the sump of the ply and the lowest part of the basin will be sequestered in clays Near springs or in zones of upwelling and the clay that's generally found is called hectorite. This is a lithium bearing clay and the Place that that's found in the United States in the United States again Here is in Nevada and this is the King Valley deposit at the McDermott caldera In northern Nevada and here you can see where they're scratching around on the ground to figure out Where they're going to get these clays out of the sediments there Now McDermott is the largest known lithium deposit in the United States and it's of this clay type Which is shown in green so here are the Salaris of the Lithium triangle in South America Here's the Clayton Valley deposit of the brine in the United States but McDermott is by far the biggest known resource in the US and It's kind of a subset of these clay type lithium resources because instead of being in a basin The ore shown in red here actually occurs in a caldera in the caldera lake sediments that Accumulated in that caldera that formed about 16 million years ago and the clays and those caldera lake sediments contain up to 9,000 ppm lithium although typical grades are about a third of that Here's a picture of the King Valley hectorite bearing caldera lake sediments And this is the hectatone trademark plant in Fernley, Nevada I was sort of embarrassed to discover I was telling people oh, I'm working on this really green thing We're working in McDermott and they're going to get lithium out of it blah blah blah and then I discovered that the main thing that they used hectorite now is for developing drilling mugs That are used in fracking in other places because hectorite has thixotropic properties and it's thermally stable up to about 300 degrees C so that's the main use that it's being used for now They're still working on the sort of metallurgy to figure out how to get the lithium out Okay, so when Tesla announced in 2014 that they were going to build a giga factory for lithium batteries here just outside of Reno This essentially set off a lithium rush in most of the basin and range province and moreover they said they'd attempt to source All of the lithium in North America now remember the only deposit in the US It's operating right now is at Clayton Valley, and it only produces 4% of the world's Current production once Tesla ramps up. They could use the whole world's production right now just for their vehicles Okay, so this is And this lithium rush has also been promoted by the continued increases in prices of lithium as Things have not come online this 2015 up to today as fast as people had hoped in terms of supply So it's lagging behind demand this lithium rush actually Resulted in people zooming all around here laying staking claims in every play out throughout Nevada and lots of promotion of properties For example this by Faraday Future is showing exactly how far away they are from the existing mine and how far away they're going to be from The Tesla Gigafactory here's another one of these kinds of advertisements Promoting that here's the Gigafactory and here's where our claims are so you should invest in us And of course there's a lot of geologists running around with their hammers hitting on clay rich sediments in the same basins Trying to find more of these clay type deposits Another thing that has augmented this and it's most recently is that in December 20th President Trump signed an executive order That is a federal strategy to ensure secure and reliable Supplies of critical minerals this actually goes beyond the energy critical ones to things that are important in defense and other things And it directs the Department of the Interior to develop a strategy to reduce reliance on foreign sources for critical minerals Tells the USGS to go find more of these and although they don't say it It's sort of implicit that maybe we should be sort of relaxing some of the mining the rules the environmental rules to make it Easier for people to produce these things in in the US so here's my my little plug Showing our research area with respect to the Tesla Gigafactory But I just want to say and this is Tom Benson looking out and again on these clay rich rocks And but I do want to say that this actually comes out of over a decade's worth of work Sort of basic science study of trying to understand what happens at the initial point of impingement of a Plume that produced the Columbia verbisalts and a bunch of rhyolites in the beginning of the Yellowstone hot spot Our detailed mapping and forty forty nine data showed That we actually could track the progression of caldera's Moving away from the impingement point and that these represent we think where this plume had impinged and then sent gigantic dikes across the landscape That caused melting in the crust to give us the rhyolite super volcanoes Now when we worked out there one of the things we noticed was that McDermott caldera is unusual in that it has the degree of mineralization Historically there had been mercury and uranium mines and We've already said that it's the largest lithium resource in the US with two megatons of Lithium deposits within these caldera lake sediments in red here The deposits in the yellow sediments also there's other energy critical elements Uranium gallium the rare earth elements and yttrium that also occur here Along the ring fractures that fractures that bound the caldera collapse So our question was what makes McDermott caldera special? Was it something about the magma composition? Is it something about the nature of the underlying crust and what are the controls on the abundance of the energy critical elements in Rhyolite magmas and this has implications for mineral exploration because are there for example undiscovered deposits In some newly discovered calderas that Tom had mapped here north of McDermott that all that yellow is also caldera lake sediments Might they be there might they be in other 16 million year calderas in Nevada and Oregon or Or what about worldwide and the reason this is important is that large rhyolitic calderas are widespread in the western us these are ones that are 16 million years here on the triple junction between Oregon Idaho and Nevada and these are ones that are a little bit older that spread all the way across Nevada and into Utah So how do we go about determining magmatic concentrations? You can't trust the rocks You can't just go out and grab a rock and analyze it and the reason is is that lithium is Very it loves to jump into the vapor phase so on eruption It jumps into the vapor and so the magma loses a lot of the lithium in it So the deposits don't have as much as the magma had to begin with Also because it's a little lion plus one It's easily leached on weathering and it's also easily mobilized when rocks get altered In the weathering environment or it a little bit higher temperatures So what's better? These are we can use melt inclusions and this idea is that it this is a crystal It's growing in a magma So this is a crystal that's a few millimeters long and these in crystals as they grow They grow around little blebs of the magma and so they trap little bits of the magma so that we can actually Analyze those little bits to get out what the original concentration was and if you use a mineral That doesn't break apart as it undergoes Depressurization They act as little pressure vessels essentially preserving the pre eruptive concentrations That of these and then of course once the rocks are on the surface There's crystals also protect those little things from being weathered or altered and so we collected We studied melt inclusions from a variety of geologic settings of places with different types of Continental crust here at McDermott nearby High Rock at Yellowstone where the hutspot plume is right now an area of thicker crust here thin crust in Mexico and one here where it's a very thin crust between Sicily and Tunisia and We analyzed melt inclusions in crystals of quartz SiO to growing in these and this is a plain light view and you can see this is one of these little melt inclusions and This is a picture in Cthulhu luminescence where you can see these melt inclusions and these are the little spot sizes So the melt inclusions are about a hundred millimeters a hundred microns and the spot sizes are only a few tons of microns So what we do is we take those crystals we mount them in epoxy and then we polish them down exposing the melt inclusions and then we analyze them for 42 elements using the Shrimp RG at Stanford calibrating against natural glasses now the shrimp RG is a Iron probe that is a gigantic thing and so because it's so big it's highly sensitive and has great resolution and so you can analyze Spots like this that are only tens of microns in diameter that only go down a short distance in this At the PPM level for a wide range of elements So what are the results of what when we did that? so this is a plot of lithium and notice it's a log scale Versus rubidium and we just choose rubidium because rubidium is an element that as things crystallize and evolve it tends to Increase so again here these spots that we analyzed on these melt inclusions using the iron probe And these are the abundances of all the different tufts that are from McDermott or the volcanic rocks that are from McDermott And what we found is they all have similar lithium concentrations prior to eruption about 1400 ppm This is much higher than the average rhyolite glass globally so then we Analyzed other things so here's one from hideaway park and you can see this is actually quite a bit higher than McDermott up at you know seven eight nine thousand PPM and Yellowstone has values that are rather similar in yellow here rather similar to the McDermott tusk But those that were from high rock and primavera are lower We think because they're on thinner more mafic continental crust and the very lowest values are Here from Pantelleria Down here at only about a hundred ppm And so this was a very surprising result to us that there was an over two orders of magnitude difference in the Magnetic concentrations of lithium so what this says is that if you're going to go exploring for lithium There's certain kinds of volcanoes and certain settings that you should be targeting first because those are the ones that kind of start out with the most lithium to begin with and When you plot all the data together again with the lithium here at a log scale Against zirconium and where basically zirconium we can use as a proxy for how thick and ancient And evolved the continental crust is with it getting more evolved with the lower Sorry my apologies Lower zirconium what we found is that there was a correlation That those things that have the highest concentrations are in thick continental crust McDermott which goes through transitional continental crust is here Where it's more mafic accreted island dark terrains the values are lower and the lowest values of all were in thin continental crust So what this tells us is if we're going to look for rhyolite caldera's that have the biggest endowment of lithium We should be looking for those that are on thick felsic old continental crust the other interesting thing was that McDermott which we know has huge resources has concentrations that are very similar to the values at Yellowstone so this suggests that other hot spot Caldera's in the Western US might be able to host similar lithium concentrations Let's get this one. So what about other energy critical elements? We analyzed a number of them, and I'm just going to go through a couple But this is for gallium and then the rare earth elements where lanthanum stands for the light rare earths dysprosium for the middle and Eterbium for the heavies and the interesting thing is the McDermott tuff where we know we have minor Mineralization is among the highest. It's the purple But it's not like way out of the range of the rest of them And so and all of these localities in Nevada and Oregon have values that are a lot higher than average Continental crust here in gray so what this tells us is that McDermott is special, but not too special and so that means we should be looking for other things and This is some work. That's ongoing by Jackson Borkart master student where he's found hints of anomalies at a newly discovered Caldera here at Hawks Valley Lone Mountain where he's here he is looking over one of these Caldera's and he's found that there are anomalous units of with much higher Two to ten times the values of yttrium, which is kind of a proxy for heavy rare earths and the light rare earth Lanthanum much higher than average continental crust and like McDermott Those samples are found right around the fractures that bounded the Caldera's We also note that in the Caldera's that Tom Benson discovered and mapped up here is that there's a huge volume of Caldera lake sediments. This is a cross section That's constructed across here. There's also some drill core data And there's something like on the order of a couple of hundred meters by about 20 kilometers worth of lake sediments all of which could potentially be a source for those so this is an important result because it means that There's the potential for more lithium than we might have anticipated and it's here right here in the Western US So I'm just going to finish by sort of making the case that Caldera's have all the necessary ingredients for a world-class lithium deposit and maybe for some other things like gallium and rare earths They have continental crust that can produce Lithium rich magmas when it's melted They on collapse of the Caldera on a voluminous eruption You create a closed basin that closed basin kind of is like a salar in Chile, but it's even more closed and In that basin Caldera lakes sediments which will from be from erosion of all this ashy debris and more explosions might put more ash in there and Post Caldera eruptions along the fractures that bound the Calderas create more glassy material that can be leached We have hydrothermal alteration due to Magmas that are intruding underneath here the remnants of the magma chamber and lots of faults and fractures along which fluids can flow and This allows for leaching of lithium out of things at the surface and Perhaps even having lithium added by continual degassing of magma that's sitting down here at depth And then finally we have a position in the Caldera lakes where we can form illite clays Deep in the Caldera lake sequence in which lithium can be sequestered at concentrations of several thousand PPM lithium So what are the takeaway messages on this one is that lithium is most enriched in those rhyolites that are formed by melting of thick Ancient continental crust the other thing is is that when you do the calculation it turns out that the magmas don't have to be enormously enriched in Lithium as long as the system is big enough So in other words if you have moderate enrichments But a big caldera with lots of material to scavenge the lithium out of you can make a deposit So what this does is it expands the potential places that you can look these Rhyolitic caldera's with caldera lake sediments as I've noted before are widely Disseminated in the Western US and so it suggests that there's very likely to be other deposits like McDermott King Valley could be found and Finally young intra caldera intra continental caldera's worldwide if we went and looked around May contain significant clay resources and if I were going to Somebody gave me a big Exploration budget what I would do is I'd target first those areas that are upstream of some of these salar deposits for example go up into the Andes in Peru and in Bolivia and look for the caldera's that produced the volcanic rocks that shed their lithium Down into the salars And with that I'll take any questions So You can't you basically have a window in which the caldera's can't be too old Because if they get too old then you would erode them and all of these caldera lake sediments would be gone And so some of the ones that we've talked about in my volcanology class where we're in the San Juan Mountains and you know There's 14,000 foot peaks and a huge amount of vertical relief in a lot of those some Many of them the caldera lake sediments have been stripped away by erosion, but not in all of them So for example creed caldera is 35 million years old. It has beautiful caldera lake sediments still preserved So the trick is is finding places where those caldera you've got the right erosion level So I have some understood something about like if you would actually go out to like look for the lithium then you You said there was something to do with like hydrothermal alteration moving things how localized is the resource? Let's say you go and you find the caldera, but it's huge or I don't know how big these things are You want to you know make only a fairly small Mine how would you how do you use well technology to determine? Where like how I'd spread with a looking beam well the ones for example in McDermott are Go on for literally kilometers and they tend to be Stratta bound that is that there are certain layers within the caldera lake sequence that have just the right permeability and Presumably, they're at just the right temperature from being buried that these clays form and so they are in the case of McDermott I don't know if I can I don't want to make you all dizzy by going back. I hate that when people do that They they go for on the order of of the individual deposits might be Two kilometers by five kilometers, and there's several of them in the caldera, so they're large so the the trick is also of course is that they're they're Laterally extensive, but they may not be vertically extensive and if they're too deep then you know If you have to strip off a lot of overburden, then they wouldn't be economic So there's aspects of of the the mining of them because pretty much you'd have to do it by open pit Just the nature of the the material Because it's a soft rock you can't drill down into it and make tunnels So you've got to have it near enough to the surface that it doesn't you don't have a lot of costs from overburden And so for example the the King Mountain ones at McDermott are right right on the surface in Many places and then locally they kind of follow a certain stratum and they'll caldera lake sediments And then they get down to maybe a few hundred feet, but that's that's okay, you know in terms of mining economics I Think That people are just starting to talk about that and of course it would be like brilliant right if you could both use the You know the enthalpy of them and then get the lithium out of them, too Most of them don't have really high concentrations of lithium But the Clayton Valley deposits only have you know a hundred ppm 200 300 So I think I think that's a big thing to do in the basin range Personally, I think that trying to find places where we've got sort of low-temperature geothermal resources That are widespread in Nevada and get lithium out of them would be really great And would be better than going around frankly and digging up pliers, you know if you could I Don't think so Let me just I think that well having worked in Nevada and been in places where they had active gold mines as long as the BLM keeps people's feet to the fire and said you have to reclaim that Often it's it doesn't look too bad. I mean if you didn't know the landscape you might go in and think it's okay In the case of China for rares The reason it's barren is not simply because they're making a big mess The reason is is for example, there used to be a major mine in California called Mountain Pass and it got shut down because rare earth elements when they occur in minerals almost always occur with uranium and thorium and So as soon as you mine that stuff you create this waste that's highly radioactive Okay, and that essentially did in molly corp's attempts at Mountain Pass They just couldn't make it go of it financially because of our Environmental rules right which is a good thing. We don't want radioactive stuff going into the ground water or being spread around But that's what they're talking about in China where if you have places where they don't quite or haven't least in the past Haven't been so cognizant or concerned about that Then They can do things at lower cost or or just do things that we just simply can't do at all Extracting boards for underwater Volcanoes is there any potential for lithium for both? underwater volcanoes are in the oceans and those are good for things like manganese and a Bunch of metals titanium other things But lithium we found is only concentrated in those places where there's continental crust And it's because it's been sort of processed through earth history over time. So the oceans No, not a good place to now seawater Maybe right because when we erode the continental crust Some of that lithium goes into solution in seawater, but the concentrations are really low I Understanding of the process it seems like we're challenging to actually work at identifying the concentration of lithium that needs various deposits It's how mature with the process if you have identified these locations where there's a reasonably good chance of You know economically viable concentration of lithium how mature is the process for actually extracting the lithium metal Right so that was what I was saying is the problem with the clay deposits right now is they're working on it But they've been working on it for about five or six years But but according to lithium America, they're almost there to figure out how to turn Hectorite either into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide and they've been working with some German metallurgy companies to figure out How how to do it pegmatites? Simple the those minerals are easy to break down you get the lithium out of it It's but the clays we haven't we're not we're not there yet But I don't it's not I don't think that that's a huge problem. Yeah Have they done any contracts yet or if not when do you think they will start doing so After this paper came out we got a we got a phone call from a vice president at Tesla You know Elon Musk like said you better find out what they're what they're talking about as far as I know They are not in any Special arrangements that but I don't know the the details of that the the real problem that I see is that For example lithium Americas which owns King Mountain the one deposit that's a clay deposit recently got a huge infusion of capital from a Chinese company now This is what what we do in this country. We let anybody invest right in the current Well, no it was even before the current administration And so the problem is is that you know now it's almost half owned by a group that you know May or may not be motivated to develop that Because maybe they want their lithium brines or whatever in China to be so I think there's some I mean My my theory is that Elon Musk and all the people that want to make electric vehicles should they should all get together They should form a consortium and they're gonna say we are gonna find this stuff We're gonna find it. We're gonna develop the metallurgy and we're just gonna like just do it the whole you know The whole from supply to using it to recycling it Lithium deposits that they're gonna have to deal with as they extract it No, not that I well not that I know of I haven't I haven't heard of anything No, they're just you know, they're clays are pretty benign at the the biggest issue would just be making a mess if you're going out and doing open pit mines So Volcanology thanks for a fascinating introduction and for making it so proud pragmatic on the energy material side. Thank you once again