Move Over China, Japanese Island Holds So Much Rare Earth Minerals That It Could Supply the World's Tech Industry for 100's of years!!

How the mud in this small Japanese island could change the global economy

It's mud. A whole bunch of mud -- an estimated 16 million tons, to be exact. And in that mud, there are massive, "semi-infinite" stores of valuable rare earth minerals. Rare earth minerals contain rare earth elements (located here on the periodic table) that are used in high-tech devices like smartphones, missile systems, radar devices and hybrid vehicles.

From article, (A small island in the Pacific Ocean is the site of a huge discovery that could change Japan's economic future. How huge? One economist called it a "game changer." The researchers who helped find it said it had "tremendous potential."

It's mud. A whole bunch of mud -- an estimated 16 million tons, to be exact. And in that mud, there are massive, "semi-infinite" stores of valuable rare earth minerals.

Rare earth minerals contain rare earth elements (located here on the periodic table) that are used in high-tech devices like smartphones, missile systems, radar devices and hybrid vehicles. For instance, yttrium, one of the metals included in this recent discovery, can be used to makecamera lenses, superconductors and cell phone screens.

According to a new paper published by a team of Japanese researchers, this huge patch of mineral-rich deep sea mud lies near Minamitorishima Island, a small island 1,1000 miles off the coast of Japan.

The 16 million tons of materials could contain 780 years worth of yttrium, 620 years worth of europium, 420 years worth of terbium, and 730 years worth of dysprosium. In other words, according to the paper, it "has the potential to supply these materials on a semi-infinite basis to the world."

That alone is a pretty big deal, but it becomes even more significant given the current supply and demand of rare earth metals. China currently holds a tight grip on the rare earth minerals -- controlling about 95% of global rare earths production as of 2015. Because of this, Japan and other countries rely on China to set prices and availability.

However, Japan has complete economic control over the new supply.

Even though Minamitorishima Island is more than a thousand miles away, it is still technically a part of Tokyo, in the village of Ogasawara, and falls within Japan's economic borders.)

For More Info 

Like all new Frontiersmen: Land Explorers, used Compasses, Sailors used Sextants, Now Future Astronauts may use a GPS that Relies on Pulsars, Called a Galactic Positioning System

NASA's Got a Plan for a 'Galactic Positioning System' to Save Astronauts Lost in Space

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Outer space glows with a bright fog of X-ray light, coming from everywhere at once. But peer carefully into that fog, and faint, regular blips become visible. These are millisecond pulsars, city-sized neutron stars rotating incredibly quickly, and firing X-rays into the universe with more regularity than even the most precise atomic clocks.

 From article, (Right now, the kind of maneuvers that navigators would need to put a probe in orbit around distant moons are borderline impossible. In the vastness of outer space, it's just not possible to figure out a ship's location precisely enough to engine-firing just right.

A telescope mounted on the International Space Station (ISS), the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), has been used to develop a brand new technology with near-term, practical applications: a galactic positioning system, NASA scientist Zaven Arzoumanian told physicists Sunday (April 15) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society.[10 Futuristic Technologies 'Star Trek' Fans Would Love]

With this technology, "You could thread a needle to get into orbit around the moon of a disant planet instead of doing a flyby," Arzoumian told Live Science. A galactic positioning system could also provide "a fallback, so that if a crewed mission loses contact with the Earth, they'd still have navigation systems on board that are autonomous."

When your phone tries to determine its position in space, as Live Science has previously reported, it listens with its radio to the precise ticking of clock signals coming from a fleet of GPS satellites in Earth orbit. The phone's GPS then uses the differences between those ticks to figure out its distance from each satellite, and uses that information to triangulate its own location in space.

Your phone's GPS works fast, but Arzoumian said the galactic positioning system would work slower —taking the time needed to traverse long stretches of deep space. It would be a small, swivel-mounted X-ray telescope, which would look a lot like the big, bulky NICER stripped down to its barest minimum components. One after another, it would point at at least four millisecond pulsars, timing their X-ray "ticks" like a GPS times the ticks of satellites. Three of those pulsars would tell the spacecraft its position in space, while the fourth would calibrate its internal clock to make sure it was measuring the others properly.

Arzoumian noted that the underlying concept behind the galactic positioning system isn't new. The famous Golden Record mounted on both Voyager spacecraft contained a pulsar map that points any aliens who one day encounter it back to planet Earth.

But this would be the first time humans have actually used pulsars to navigate. Already, Arzoumian said, his team has managed to user NICER to track the ISS through space.

And that's all in low-Earth orbit, he said, with the station wheeling in wild, unpredictable circles and half the sky blocked out by a giant planet, covering different pulsars every 45 minutes. In deep space, with a functionally unlimited field of view and where things mostly move in predictable, straight lines, he said, the task will be much easier.

Already, Arzoumian said, other teams within NASA have expressed interest in building the galactic positioning system into their projects. He declined to say which, not wanting to speak for them. But it seems likely that we might see such a futuristic device in action in the very near future.)

For More Info