00:04Rare earth metals are of increasing importance to humanity as our batteries and other technological
00:08components are often made from these precious resources meaning researchers are always on the
00:14lookout for new places to find them and they may have just found one experts say that when volcanoes
00:18erupt sometimes the magma which is brought up from deep underground is particularly good at
00:23gathering some of those very materials however the type of volcano and accompanying magma which
00:27they're looking for has never erupted in human history meaning the researchers say we should
00:32be looking at extinct volcanoes for our sources of the iron-rich magma where the rare earth elements
00:37might be hiding in fact recently the corona volcano in sweden was announced as the biggest resource for
00:43rare earth metals in europe so scientists went to the lab to test this theory and see if the find
00:48was a fluke essentially recreating a tiny volcano in a controlled setting finding that when they
00:53pressurized synthetic volcanic material and melted it at temperatures over 2 000 degrees fahrenheit
00:58the iron-rich magma remained as tiny bubbles within the material it then absorbed all of the rare earth
01:03elements around it collecting them into deposits at densities 200 times greater than the rest of the
01:08magma proving these extinct volcanoes could be active sources for these precious materials
