Earth’s Geological MRI
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
Chris Bolhuis: See, I just multitask like that. Did you see that
Dr. Jesse Reimink: What? Listening
Chris Bolhuis: trying to distract
Dr. Jesse Reimink: me
Chris Bolhuis: and listen to you? That's right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, you are an impressive phenomenon. You know that.
Chris Bolhuis: I know and do you know that?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You do know that,[00:00:30]
Chris Bolhuis: I do.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I was thinking of you today because I was, uh, chopping some wood outside and I thought, you know what? I got some stumps and I need, uh, Chris OUIs to come grind them for me. How much does
Chris Bolhuis: I I could do
Dr. Jesse Reimink: would you charge me to come to Pennsylvania and grind two stumps for me?
Chris Bolhuis: fly me out there. Rent me the equipment and I'm yours
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah. Free. Wow. Free quote, unquote free.
Chris Bolhuis: that's right. That's how much I care about you, Jesse.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:01:00] I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Christopher,
Chris Bolhuis: All right. Well, hey, are you ready to do this,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, I am, and this is, I'm excited. I must say this is like, um, this is an inspiring episode. I think for me personally, I, I'm feeling inspired.
Chris Bolhuis: I agree. I'm interested to hear what your take on this topic is. Um, and then like, I certainly had, a take on this a, a definite takeaway.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So what we did here is there was a, and this is kind of, there's a big theme about critical minerals and you know, there's a [00:01:30] lot of stuff in the news about Congress passing critical minerals bills, and there's, a lot of noise about things like critical minerals. And so there was a article in science, the article is in Science of the Magazine, which is a science publication. It's one of the top, publications for research, but they also have kind of editorial, notes in it. And this was an editorial note, and it's on what's called the Earth Mapping Resource Initiative or Earth, M r I.
And Chris, what's Earth, M r I and why did we read this? I guess.
Chris Bolhuis: [00:02:00] Okay. that's a loaded question right there. Cause it was this, you said this was an editorial note. It was like a 10 page
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It, it was, but, but it wasn't like a research article, I guess is what I mean. It's like a, it, it, it's, um, an interesting take on something, but it's not research. It wasn't data and research and things.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Basically we have a need that is not gonna go away and this is for the critical minerals, rare earth elements and so on, and the United States U S G S is woefully behind in this. and I [00:02:30] mean, actually, so this is one of the things that I took away from the article is Congress asked U S G S about.
the resources that we have in our country, and they didn't have a response. That's, that was a shocking part of the article, right. Is that they, they didn't know because nothing has been done in what, 50 years. Right, Jesse? Nothing like this has been done.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, this Earth mri, this earth mapping resource initiative, they said it's the first major assessment of US natural resources in about 50 [00:03:00] years. Which shocked me. I mean, and let me, the word. We're behind many Western countries, many other developed countries like Australia, Canada. I did my PhD in Canada.
You these are economies that are based on resources, and so Canada always has these programs, they're always getting re-upped by the federal government for their geological survey, the Canadian Geological Survey to do. These types of campaigns, and this was a new one for the us. I mean, 320 million from [00:03:30] Congress.
in large part goes to this sort of mapping initiative. So Chris, you and I read this article and we just thought, hey, this is a, a
good fodder for a
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, let me, let me interrupt you a second because let's, let's finish this up. In terms of what they did, basically they're, taking aircraft and they are equipping these planes with very high tech equipment like lidar. which produces these very, very high resolution topo maps and it can look through the foliage down to the surface and so on.
you have these. Geophysics [00:04:00] things that are attached to these aircraft as well. Things like magnetometers and gamma ray spectrometers. So they can look at from the air what elements are below them, which is absolutely amazing to me. These hyperspectral devices that look at reflected light to try to ID minerals and rocks, like that's, that was amazing.
And so you have these really techy instruments
Dr. Jesse Reimink: me interrupt real quick, Chris, because there's also like basic geologic mapping, like you think [00:04:30] geologists, boots on the ground walking around mapping and this is distributed in different parts of the country. There's a big focus in the Southwest, a big focus in like the Midwest, surprisingly, and the Northeast as well.
So couple areas that are maybe under mapped or under understood, I suppose. And so anyway, sorry for interrupting there, but I just wanna say there's boots on the ground in addition to the high tech stuff that you just mentioned.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Well I think what kind of led to this is that they were doing this in Maine, just south of the, Canadian border there. And they, uncovered or they [00:05:00] discovered these deposits well, at least they thought they did right from the air. And then These geologists bush whacked through the forest to get to this spot, and what they discovered is amazing. They discovered billions of dollars worth of zirconium, opium.
Other elements that are critical in electronics and defenses and these renewable like things that we need for batteries and, and this kind of like, you know, electric vehicles and, and just crazy stuff.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. All from flying one of these, uh, magnetic [00:05:30] susceptibility surveys, which basically maps the, yeah. Susceptibility or transitions in the earth, which often pertain to geologic boundaries. Like faults. You can see, you can see different rock types, and they found, well, there's this really weird trache I thing that is loaded with zirconia.
Minow in it. Yeah. Crazy, crazy. Cool.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. But the other thing is, is now we're trying to figure out what concentrates these rare earth elements, what is the geologic process that does this? so it's like we're relearning [00:06:00] this really important root of Geology here.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so, uh, maybe Chris, let me just put some numbers on this thing real quick and then I'm curious what you kind of took away from this article, and we could, we could start there, but basically the origin of this Earth mri, which is a really cool name by the way, an Earth mri. Basically 320 million to be spent over five years, and that's a third of the entire US Geological surveys budget.
So a significant amount of money. And like you said, they're flying all these high tech surveys [00:06:30] and also mapping.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. I want to interrupt you though, because this is also very unusual that, you know, Congress allocated this money to the U S G S to do this. Right. And there is, I don't know, I can't think of anything else that garners this kind of bipartisan support.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that was, that's a great point. It's a great, it's a, it's a really, really great point. So what did you take away from this? Like, you know, reading and understanding? Cuz I was not aware of this initiative. I probably should have been before this time, but I was not aware of this initiative till [00:07:00] reading this article.
And I don't know, what'd you take away from it, Chris? What? What did you think?
Chris Bolhuis: I was excited. I'll say that. I was excited for people that are excited about Geology and I'm talking about young people that are excited about the field of Geology. This is what, what gets you going and you, you know, it's your passion, right? And because the future looks really bright, I guess is what I'm saying.
I, I look at this and say, we're behind in something. We need to fix this. And I think that there's a,[00:07:30] there's a, uh, a deficit of geologists to go do this work,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well that's a, that's a great point, Chris, cuz there, there actually is, and another article we kind of looked at, one that came out actually in the Wall Street Journal just recently, I think a couple days ago I forwarded onto my research group. But, it's this whole article about how mining companies cannot hire enough people and part of it is, is mining engineers, part of it is geologists.
So there's a lot of. Tasks that mining companies can't hire enough people for. But they did show a plot of graduates with Geology and Earth [00:08:00] Science degrees in the US and this peaked really in 20 16, 20 17, and it's dropped by almost 25% since that time. and that's not just.
Because of college enrollment drops, college enrollment has gone up over that interval, but the number of Geology and earth science graduates has dropped from around, around about 8,000 down to below 6,000 now. And so I think the combination of these two things, like the fact that we have a renewed focus on the resources of our country, fundamentally geological resources, [00:08:30] Combined with the fact that there's not enough people being trained as a geologist at the moment means that it's a good time to be a geologist and
it
Chris Bolhuis: so.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: to be for a little while.
Right. I, I, this is a great sales pitch for like our field. I, I, I agree. I was very excited reading this, Chris. Very
Chris Bolhuis: Well, yeah, because Jesse, this brings to light something that you and I are so, so passionate about, the importance of the geosciences like to us. Geology [00:09:00] makes the world go round, right? I mean, You can't separate the importance of Geology. we say this kind of tongue in cheek with biology and so on, and, and that's super, super important.
But man, the geosciences and the social relevance is, I don't know why everybody hasn't caught onto this.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And that's a, a great point, Chris, because we had talked just recently in an office hours episode, I think about how you and I, we both got our degrees in a time when there wasn't [00:09:30] a huge amount of Geology industry out there. And so people who are geologists are often passionate about their field, right?
Like they're, we talk about it and I know you pitch it as well as like, this is a great thing to know for your life, like walking around, understanding stream meanders is really great for you to know because it enriches your life. what excites me about this. Initiative and this deficit in geologists is that you can actually have a really lucrative career as a geologist.
Like what makes more geologists is geologists making a bunch of money [00:10:00] going out there and having, you know, great careers. That breeds more geologists, I think. Right? and it, and so I think it's a different aspect than you and I graduated college cuz this thing did not exist when I graduated college.
And it would've like added additional inspiration, additional fuel to the fire for me personally.
Chris Bolhuis: That's a really good point. Which brings me to my next takeaway is that, these resource, we're looking at this in a totally different way. We're going back and looking at mining tailings and seeing if we can go [00:10:30] back into this stuff that's already been mined and extract new things out of it. I mean, it's, it's crazy because basically, The low hanging fruit has been picked, you know, like these, these easy to get fines don't exist anymore.
And so now we're just looking at this which, means that now we really have to understand the processes, the geologic processes that form and concentrate these rare earth elements. We have to understand that. And then that shapes [00:11:00] where we go and look for this kind of stuff. And it just,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let me interrupt there, Chris, because that's a great point. Like there, there's two factors at play and there's a quote in this article that says, we are entering a new golden age for economic Geology. And so first of all, I wanna make my points and then I have a story about economic Geology. But, but the first thing is exactly as you said, like the easy stuff's been picked through, so.
the easy deposit, the big copper vein that's obviously pure copper and easy to mine, that's been mined. And so now to get more copper, it's [00:11:30] becoming more difficult. We have to understand copper mineralization in a new way. There's another thing at play though, which is. Copper's not the only thing that's interesting anymore. It's not just copper and iron and gold and silver. It's niobium and neodymium and lithium. It's all these elements that we've not really cared about before.
At least not to the degree we care about them now because, and I think this, this like really highlights the level of shift that we're undergoing in. Human energy. [00:12:00] We are just undergoing such a transformational shift right now. and Geology will play a central role in that. I just, it, it makes me excited for the future, of our field here.
Right.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about in terms of how we look for these things, right? one of these aircraft equipped with a gamma race spectrometer, which is, I think most people are familiar with what a Geiger counter is, right?
You put a geiger counter next to something that is, you made alpha particles and it goes tick, tick, tick, tick, you [00:12:30] know, and it, it's picking up these, these decay particles. Well, We use that information just like a, a Geiger counter, because if we find then volcanic rocks that have uranium and thorium and potassium in them, and we find it using these gamma ray spectrometers, well, we know that these rare earth minerals that we're looking for also tend to be incorporated in the crystal structure.
Of minerals that have those [00:13:00] decaying elements in it. And that's just really a cool thing. Right? So it's changing the way we look. it's amazing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's a great point. And there's other programs like the U S G S has this Earth MRI program. There's other programs. DARPA has a big program to use artificial intelligence associated with all of these mapping tools and like integrate all these together to try and find, you know, new deposits or come up with new ideas about how deposits form and where to prospect for these things.
I think Chris. One [00:13:30] aspect of this article that really kind of amazed me is back to the discovery of this naum in zirconium deposit up in Maine. I don't know, I always envision Maine as like, I. The geology's been worked out there. You know, like, I don't know. I think Maine is where some of the classic studies in the forties of granite's happened and, and it's kind of like this classic place that, you know, it's been mapped, right?
I would've thought that most of the relevant stuff has been discovered and the fact that [00:14:00] something new can be discovered. Today is really cool and I think that adds like a new aspect to walking around and looking at the Geology of any area. If there's a new discovery in Maine, it could happen anywhere, probably.
Right. I just think that's a really interesting that stood out to me as something that's surprising and quite cool, I think.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, when I think of Maine, I think of really rugged, thick forest and, and this, these aircraft are flying over the surface, [00:14:30] maybe a hundred meters above the surface, and they're able to look through that and determine chemical compositions, like what minerals, what rocks are below this. That is, Absolutely amazing
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's so cool, so cool. Right. another thing that stood out to me was the lithium in the McDermott crater. And, I think this is, uh, an really important thing because it's. Probably, or maybe I, you know, it's a, it's a hot topic, but it has potential [00:15:00] for becoming one of the early lithium mines in the US and it's intimately associated with.
Big volcanic eruptions. It's really the first crater in the Snake River plane in the Yellowstone, like hotspot track. That is the first crater, or the first Calera. Really? I'm saying crater. It's a Calera McDermott. Calera. That's the first one. 16 million year old. and there's a big lithium resource there in Lithium.
We can't get enough lithium in our society for all the batteries we need. Right.
Chris Bolhuis: I know, [00:15:30] I know.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: uh, interesting
Chris Bolhuis: And that drew my attention right away because as soon as I read McDermott, I immediately recognized its relationship to the Yellowstone hotspot. And it's really interesting. Right. But why did. Lithium concentrate in that calera, but not the rest as it tracked up towards where Yellowstone is right now.
Right. And they, they really don't have a good answer for that right
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Right.
Chris Bolhuis: but I think that's gonna change. I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, there's a lot of research going, going towards understanding calera, forming eruptions and, and [00:16:00] lithium concentration in there. So, it's a really important question cuz the lithium, uh, resource is quite big there. And if its possible to find it in other ones in the Yellowstone hotspot track, that'd be great.
Chris Bolhuis: that's the understatement of the year, I think,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Right, right. For sure, for sure. Um, I was also surprised, Chris, that there are these heavy mineral deposits. These heavy mineral sands, like there's a mine in Florida I'd never heard of. That's mining zircon, titanium, niobium, all these sort of [00:16:30] heavy minerals and it's all concentrated in heavy sands, ancient heavy sand deposits.
So I always think back to the shores of Lake Michigan. You can always find the dark layers in the sand. Like whenever you have a, a sort of a dune beach cliff kind of eroded, maybe it's even six inches high. It doesn't need to be a cliff, but you'll see the dark layers of heavy minerals in there, and it's just that kind of concentration on a much larger scale.
And it's mineable it, it's extractable, it's, it's an economic deposit of these elements, the elements like [00:17:00] naam and zirconium, et cetera, that are important for society as well. So that surprised me.
Chris Bolhuis: I want to ask you about that because those stripes of black sand that you're talking about, we, call those black sands along the Lake Michigan shoreline. That's primarily the mineral magnetite. If you drag a mi a magnet through that, it's just gonna come up loaded with, magnetite dust all over the place.
Right? So what is, what's in the magnetite? That we would be after. Do you, do you have an answer for
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, so it's less about the [00:17:30] magnetite. The magnetite is just very heavy as well. So you can see Garnet ones in there, like sometimes these things will have a really deep purple tinge to them, and they'll be loaded with garnet. They'll be loaded with zircon as well, much higher concentration than in your average rock. Like if you just scooped up the background sand, you'll find maybe one zircon in. I don't know, several thousand grains in that heavy mineral stuff, you'll find like 10 or 20 per thousand grains. Right. So it's just a higher concentration, which means economic. So it's [00:18:00] less about the magnetite itself, I think, like I don't think many, of these processes are mining them for iron. they concentrate magnetite and garnet and zircon and tight knight and,
Chris Bolhuis: Okay, so it's,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: minerals.
Chris Bolhuis: It's kind of like a placer deposit then, right? It's it's density settling and, yes, that's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly.
Chris Bolhuis: makes sense.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And this Earth MRI is kind of mapping some of the stuff down in the southwest as well for these ancient, sort of sediment deposits.
Well, it's, it's, they're not sedimentary rocks. They're sort of sand deposits buried deep down. [00:18:30] So, that's kind of interesting. I never, I never knew that before that Florida
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: these heavy sand operations going on.
Chris Bolhuis: I did not either.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. Chris, so do you have anything else on this article before we kind of wrap up this episode? Any last thoughts that, that this thing made you think of?
Chris Bolhuis: Absolutely. There was one other thing that caught my eye because I talk about this a lot, in my Geology classes, and that is the New Madrid in Missouri. These earthquakes that happened in 1811 and 1812, there was a series of, three of the largest earthquakes to ever strike the United [00:19:00] States, east of the Rocky Mountains.
These were massive earthquakes. Okay? And so, uh, that drew my attention right away because it was discussed a little bit in this article. The bottom line is, is that there was, when rodinia, this supercontinent, before Pangea broke apart, it created these, zones of weakness, right? These faults happened and so on, and, and it was actually along those faults that resulted in the New Madrid earthquakes in 1811 and 1812.
But what [00:19:30] happened then is when Africa collided with North America to form the Appalachians, when. Pangea came together. There was magma generated from this collision, and gases rose up and, basically, the bottom line is, is that those faults from the rifting created a conduit for.
The concentration of rare earth elements. And so it's just this, again, it's this really cool requirement that we need to know [00:20:00] how these things play together because then that shifts where we go ahead and start looking for
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that, that's a really, that's a really good point, Chris. I think, you know, following these faults that are hard to map because they're buried beneath the crust and they're, they're in some sediments and they're, yeah. Yeah. Really kind of amazing. that's a great point. I, I like that.
I hadn't, that part, I hadn't really read as carefully, so, uh, yeah, I like that. That's nice.
Chris Bolhuis: okay? So Jesse, let's go ahead and wrap this episode up. what do you think? What's a good summary of what we have going on?[00:20:30]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I, I don't know, Chris, I. I'm inspired by this type of thing, and I just wanna say that this is about the U S G S and their mri, their mapping resource initiative. But from my view, you know, I pay attention a lot to what funding agencies are doing. And the National Science Foundation, darpa, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, all of these.
Groups have programs dedicated to critical minerals, and so I think it's just underlining [00:21:00] how imminent this energy transition that we're going to go through as a society is, and how important it is and how important Geology will be.
So I just think it's, it's an inspiring and really good time to. To be a geologist and to have expertise in things like the things we talk about in this podcast. I, I just found it really inspiring and it made me sort of excited to do my job in a, in a new way, you know what I mean? I, I found it that way.
I, I, did you find it like inspiring as an [00:21:30] educator in a way or, or
Chris Bolhuis: I absolutely did. I absolutely found that part of it inspiring. But I do want to touch on one thing, Jesse. It's always a good time to be a geoscientist, because, look, think about this a second. Have you ever met an unhappy geologist?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, it's true. It's true, it's true. Well, maybe what I'll say then is it's a newly lucrative time to be a geologist. How about that? Like, you can probably be a geologist and, and make more money than you used to be [00:22:00] able to.
Perhaps so. And to be happy because it's a great field.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. And you know, maybe this is gonna change things in terms of If you're going into Geology and you're in America and you say, well, I'm going into Geology that now, maybe people won't look at you like you have a horn going outta your head.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. And I think there's a, that's, that brings up another good point, Chris, cuz we don't actually know how this is gonna turn out. You know, lithium batteries, that's really the main thing. We use lithium for neodymium, we use it for magnets [00:22:30] like, Technology could change. We could have sodium batteries in the next five, 10 years, right?
So there's a lot that could change, but they're all gonna be dependent upon resources. So, So we just don't know how it's gonna turn out, but geoscience is gonna be intimately related to this transition? I think so. It's exciting.
I don't know. It's exciting. It was exciting reading this thing I, I sort of inspired and, I don't know. It's just fun. It's fun to think about the future, I think here.
Chris Bolhuis: It is. another interesting point about the article too, is that [00:23:00] once we get to a point, then these rare earth elements, if we recycle properly, it'll kind of level off. Right. I mean, that was, that was one of the things that they made in there is that like we, but, but, but it has to be made important.
And right now we're not there. You know, we talked about this with Nadal Nassar, anyway, that was another, I think, interesting takeaway as
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that, that, that's a good point. They kind of juxtaposed it against, uh, hydrocarbons, which is like a pure consumption consuming, consuming, consuming. And if with [00:23:30] lithium, if we do it right, you mine a bunch and then you reuse it within batteries. So that's true that this might not be, you know, a super long lived pulse, but it's, it's definitely gonna be decades long.
This, of renewed focus on these types of resources. So,
Chris Bolhuis: That's right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, Chris, I think that's probably a good time to wrap up the episode. Hey, if you wanna learn all the basics of Geology, we're obviously passionate about it. It's a great time to be a geologist like we talked about. If you wanna learn all the basics, head over to geo.camp courses.com.
That is the first link in the show [00:24:00] notes. Here, you can learn all the basics of Geology from Chris and I with all the images you need. You can support us in our podcast here. You can go to planet geo cast.com. You can support us, subscribe, find past episodes and transcripts there, and give us a rating and a review, if you will.
We really appreciate that.
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Peace. [00:24:30]
