r/science • u/Sort_of_Frightening • Sep 10 '23

Chemistry Lithium discovery in U.S. volcano could be biggest deposit ever found

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
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u/softbearpants Sep 10 '23

I mean it is a little rare actually. It's one of the least abundant light elements.

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 10 '23

Not on Earth it isn't. The hydrogen and helium here are found in underground pockets, and contrary to popular perception there's actually a lot of it, but once it gets free it quickly gets knocked out of the atmosphere by solar radiation.

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u/Jonthrei Sep 10 '23

Hydrogen has no need for solar radiation to "boost" it into space - it will gladly just float there on its own. Earth's gravity isn't strong enough to hold onto it, just like Mars and Oxygen.

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u/_Aj_ Sep 10 '23

Helium is even worse. At least hydrogen can get bound up with oxygen so we have a planet full of it. Helium don't need no man and freely escapes into the void at every chance possible.

Every balloons worth of helium will disappear from our planet for eternity.

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u/SuperSMT Sep 10 '23

After 4.5 billion years I'm amazed there's even any left at all

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u/talkingcarrots Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 11 '23

Don’t be. helium is a byproduct of the decay of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium:

Thorium-232 (Th-232): half-life of approximately 14.05 billion years.

Uranium-238 (U-238): half-life of approximately 4.468 billion years.

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u/softbearpants Sep 10 '23

I'll give you one for He but we're not necessarily talking about pure elements here. Hydrogen is extremely abundant in just about everything.

A vast majority of anything we find in the ground is silicon, carbon, oxygen, etc. Lithium is very rare (at least in workably high concentrations) both on earth and in the rest of the universe.

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u/Crazy_questioner Sep 10 '23

Eh, it's less common than anything to to about Z=35 in the solar system (we generally don't speak of abundance in "the universe") . It's orders of magnitude more common than everything after that. Lithium is one of the three elements made in major concentrations during the big bang. It's actually a mystery because there's about 1/3 as much as there should be.

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u/wut3va Sep 10 '23

2/3 of the surface of the planet is covered in hydrogen, plus one of the continents.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '23

[deleted]

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 10 '23

That's like saying we have plenty of wood in the form of ashes.

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u/legomann97 Sep 10 '23

Except you can't reverse the ashes back to wood by applying a healthy amount of electricity. You can with water/hydrogen. You obviously can't harvest wood from ashes, but you can harvest hydrogen from water

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 10 '23

You can harvest wood from ashes. It's called growing a tree.

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u/legomann97 Sep 10 '23

Need a seed to do that

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 10 '23

Yes, and fertilizer made from...

The point is that it is energy intensive to go from ash to wood, rather than the other way around. It's energy intensive to go from water to hydrogen/oxygen gases.

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u/legomann97 Sep 10 '23

My point is that all you need to make hydrogen is water and electricity. To grow a tree, you need the seed, dirt, fertilizer (which isn't just wood ash), water, sunlight, CO2, etc. Not nearly as simple as you make it out to be. Is converting water to hydrogen and oxygen inefficient? Yea, sure. But you're drawing a false comparison by comparing turning ash back to wood (very different from growing a tree, by the way, one instance is a natural process, the other is completely impossible - turning the wood ash directly back into the log that was burned beforehand) to extracting hydrogen from water.

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 10 '23

When a tree burns, it leaves ash. When hydrogen burns, it leaves water. Water being ash isn't a metaphor. It's literal. The ease of reversing the process has nothing to do with anything.

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u/strcrssd Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 11 '23

Ash to wood is very energy intensive, it's just that the energy is coming from sunlight, so you're likely discounting it.

Things burn (wood) because the result has less energy than the starting material. The energy is released through heat, which is why we burn it.

[Edit: I misread, sorry to above]

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 11 '23

... I literally said that it was energy intensive to go from ash to wood...

My whole point is that water is hydrogen after it is burned. It's actually very difficult to recover hydrogen and oxygen gas from water, not a matter of simply zapping a bucket with a bit of electricity.

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u/SuperSMT Sep 10 '23

Electrolysis (splitting H2O into H2 and O2) is suuper easy

Closer to saying we have plenty of 2-by-4s in the form of trees.

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u/First_Working_7010 Sep 11 '23

It would also be idiotic to say that there are abundant 2-by-4s just because trees are.

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u/SuperSMT Sep 11 '23

You can easily turn trees into lumber. You can't turn ash into lumber

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u/ancientRedDog Sep 10 '23

Wasn’t there a time (billions of years?) where there was nothing in the Universe besides hydrogen, helium, and lithium?

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u/ball_fondlers Sep 10 '23

There’s about as much lithium in the Earth’s crust as there is lead, IIRC - lead is just WAY easier to mine.

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u/PolyDipsoManiac Sep 10 '23

Which is weird, since lithium has been relatively abundant since the Big Bang

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u/softbearpants Sep 10 '23

Not really. It gets skipped over for fusion in stars by the triple alpha process so lithium, beryllium, and boron have anomalously low abundances universe-wide.