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Posted by antidnan 10/22/2024

USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas(www.usgs.gov)
337 points | 222 commentspage 3
joelignaatius 10/22/2024|
[dead]
hello_computer 10/22/2024||
[flagged]
farceSpherule 10/22/2024||
Will never happen, because, you know... The environment...

People in the U.S. would rather be slaves to China than be self sufficient as we once were...

FactKnower69 10/23/2024|
at what point in history was the US ever anything approaching "self sufficient"? did I miss the american juche autarky period in history class?
jerf 10/22/2024||
I read the article carefully, twice. Doesn't have a link to any original paper, of course. And I can't find the answer to my question... did they, you know, validate the model? Did they actually take some samples at new locations and compare it to what the model says?

Or are they literally just announcing that "Hey, we told the computer to tell us something, so it told us something"? Yes, that is how it works. The computer will always tell you something if you make it tell you something. That isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting it to tell you things that correspond to reality.

In the absence of validation, this means very little, especially in an environment where the USGS is fairly incentivized to loudly announce to the world that we've totes got plenty of lithium, my fellow countries, any effort to keep lithium away from us is just a waste of time, look at us just rolling in lithium over here.

Or, maybe they did do the validation, and it's just the reporting that doesn't consider that an important aspect of the story. Somewhere between funding and press release someone's lost the trail but I don't know who exactly.

gwern 10/22/2024|
It has a link to the original paper clearly visible right at the bottom where they usually are in scientific press releases like this?

> The study, which was published in Science Advances, can be found at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8149 .

flenserboy 10/22/2024|
Interesting, & not necessarily in a good way. This method could well presage unprecedented numbers of attempts at eminent domain takings or other means of forcing people out of their properties.
scottyah 10/22/2024||
Which government agency would use eminent domain to take land and start mining? We have historical precedence with the oil industry using various scanning methods in a similar manner, but it was the oil companies who went to the landowners to acquire the rights to extract. Then the government would buy the (usable) product from them.
fullstop 10/22/2024||
Local government condemned a bunch of perfectly fine homes in Wisconsin, by declaring them blighted, to make room for a Foxconn plant which never really panned out. Where there is greed there is a way.
richwater 10/22/2024||
National security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
walleeee 10/22/2024|||
Globally price-competitive domestic electric car production is a national security concern only if we are willing to accept a rather short time horizon and a rather narrow definition of security in our analysis.

This kind of article can perhaps be understood as an attempt to turn a federal organization's sails into the prevailing political winds, so to speak, at a time when funding seems insecure. I say this as someone who strongly supports most of the survey's mission. It would be ideal if national power brokers recognized the value of water science, geology, ecology, etc, on their own terms.

FpUser 10/22/2024||||
And of course you would not mind owners of extraction company leaving all the profits to people who got kicked out of their home. After all they should be happy just fulfilling your "national security" goal.
ifdefdebug 10/22/2024|||
sure. just make sure to pay them what their land is worth... with the lithium below.
ct0 10/22/2024|||
Is there case law on how deep land goes? I could imagine that there will be in the near future.
engineer_22 10/22/2024||
Yes, mineral rights are well defined in US real property law.
jumploops 10/22/2024|||
Do most residential land parcels include mining rights?
chx 10/22/2024|||
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-the-mineral...

> Mineral rights are automatically included as a part of the land in a property conveyance, unless and until the ownership gets separated at some point by an owner/seller.

> Since sellers of land can convey only property that they own, each sale of the land after the minerals are separated automatically includes only the land. Deeds to the land made after the first separation of the minerals will not refer to the fact that the mineral rights are not included.

> in most cases, you cannot determine whether you own the rights to the minerals under your land just by looking at your deed. Owners are sometimes surprised to find out someone else owns the rights to the minerals under their land

> U.S. laws regulating mining and mineral rights typically prohibit mineral owners from damaging or interfering with the use of any homes or other improvements on the land when extracting minerals. As a result, mineral owners do not typically attempt mineral extraction in highly populated areas. This means that if you live in a city, or an area with many houses on small plots of land, you probably won't need to worry about whether or not you own any minerals that might be under you

lesuorac 10/23/2024|||
idk, but if you're going to buy a house check if it's "Fee Simple" which does include mineral rights.

https://www.rangerminerals.com/what-does-fee-simple-estate-o...