How rare are Greenland’s rare earth elements?

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Hello! Welcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service. I'm Tom Whipple. This week, if hypothetically, you're a proud deal maker who wants to invade a very large Arctic island and extract its resources, How much money could you really make? And is long COVID just a particular instance of the disease ME? And if so, can looking at both help us treat both?

And our global science guy, Roland Pease, has been speaking with the astronomers keeping an eye on a very near Earth flyby, or even collision, set for twenty thirty two. Then, to go through the best of the studies from the science journals, I will also be joined by nature journalist Lizzie Gidney. Lizzie, give us the tease.

We have uh some studies mimicking the way that octopuses camouflage and the discovery of some of the first poison-tipped arrows. Fabulous. We'll look forward to that. Um but first

Imagine the scenario, it's twenty twenty eight. At last the stars and stripes flutter in the icy breeze above the new capital of Greenland, Tromptopia. Visiting the fifty second State, Trump promises, in an unexpected nod to the days of Eric the Red, to make Greenland great again. But as the great deal maker adds a lot of polar bears to the US census, will he find the continent to be a profitable endeavour in the business as well as security sense?

Does it really have the mineral riches some suggest? Let's leave futurology behind and chat to Adrian Finch, Professor of Geology at St. Andrew's University. He has been studying these minerals from long before they were cooled. Adrian, explain what it is you do in Greenland. So I'm interested to understand how mineral deposits form. And for that reason I'm particularly interested in Greenland because there's very little coverage in soil.

The area is very, very easy for me to to explore the geology. It's not got settlements on it. And sometimes I have very large areas where glaciers have cut vertical slices superstructures. So for all of those reasons it's fantastic for me to work in a place like Greenland, but in addition there is commercial interest in the results of our work, which means that what we do has a direct impact.

And so Trump's UN ambassador has talked about the importance of Greenland's critical minerals. Before we get specifically to Greenland, when we talk about rare and critical minerals, what do we actually mean? So there are many elements, metals, which are used quite routinely now in a whole variety of technologies. And one of the key examples of that is your mobile phone, which has something between 45 and 60 different metals in it.

So there is across the world a drive to find new sources of these often very rare elements. So for that reason, there is interest not just in Greenland, but across the globe, to find new sources for metals, rare earth. which are used in green technologies, and also things like niobium, which is used in MRI scanners, and also tantalum, which is a key part of your mobile phone.

And how do we find them? W where where where are they formed? So the types of rocks that I'm looking for are ones which are formed underneath ancient volcanoes. And I'm looking for geological environments which were many millions of years ago equivalent to modern East Africa. Today, underneath East Africa, we believe that there are mineral deposits being formed. But they are deep underground so we cannot access them.

And what we're looking for in other parts of the world, such as Greenland, are places where this process happened deep in geological time. But now those volcanoes have been eroded away and they've left us with the plumbing systems underneath the volcano itself. And it's in those plumbing systems that we find many of these rare element deposits are being formed. They're not making the elements. Why why are they sort of just just popping up there? No, no, no. Well the the earth contains

All sorts of elements. Let's take a metal like gold. There's gold everywhere. If you go and look at rocks underneath where you are in Cardiff now, there's got parts per billion gold in it. The volcanoes what they're doing is they're stripping rare earth from The Earth's mantle, and then dumping them very close to the Earth's surface. And that's why that's a potential deposit. I could, in principle,

get rare earth out from almost any rock. But if I'm gonna make money, I need to get it out from a rock where the concentration is really, really high. Is this what we find in Greenland? Is this a new El Dorado of rare earths and critical minerals. It's certainly a very, very large jurisdiction and it has a wide variety of different resources that we we know about. We know it that many of these are close to being

Potentially exploitable. Some some projects have been exploited. For example, there's a gold mine in the south of Greena, which is active. Uh but it's it's is it totally unique in the world? The answer to that is no. I mean if I sort of looked in Canada or or America would I find similar Resources. Yep, so these resources stretch in a band which you can take across uh Canada through Greenland and then over into Norway, Sweden and Finland.

So there are very similar projects to the ones which are being uh considered in Greenland in those countries as well. So it is not that that Greenland is absolutely unique. But what it does have, which is very advantageous is that there is relatively little population on the country, which means that if you're trying to think of setting up a a mine or something of that nature,

They're less likely to be people in the near vicinity who would be negatively impacted by that project. Last question, you go there a a a fair bit. Um when you were there last were the Were the Greenlanders excited? Were they practicing the Star Spangled Banner and sort of looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving? Well I I think we should let Greenlanders. discuss how they feel about it themselves, but certainly my opinion.

was that Greenland was not necessarily receptive to simply being taken over by a foreign nation, irrespective of whether that foreign nation had the intention of developing it. Professor Adrian Finch, thank you very much indeed.

In eighteen ninety-four, as a pandemic known as Russian flu came to an end, Thomas Dowes, a doctor, started seeing a different kind of patient. These patients, he said, had a lethargy the like he had never seen. Nature is unnatural to such beings. and their very bodily gait and countenance and movements are the outward exponents of the sluggish, molecular processes of the wearied soul within.

This sense of gloom and dejection is a conscious living entity as sad as Hades, where joy and tranquility and peace and love are unknown. In nineteen twenty, in the aftermath of another virus, this time called Spanish flu, there was famine in East Africa. It wasn't blamed on crop failure, but by a failure of the people to get the crops out of the ground. They were exhausted. And today, after another pandemic, millions around the world complain of similar problems.

Is the thing that we call long COVID unique to COVID, or is it just an instance of something more general, extreme postviral lethargy? For those suffering from ME, often blamed on infection, there was hope that research into long COVID might aid research into their illness. Now, a major research effort is looking to use deep sequencing to understand at a metabolic and genetic level the immunological parallels between the two.

The ME Association has awarded one point one million pounds to scientists at Imperial College. And Danny Altman is the virologist who co leads the programme. Across the two conditions, about um a thousand people get recruited and um as you expect for an immunologist, the sort of biggie is that they give us a blood sample.

and we analyse immune system cells, white blood cells. They also get asked if they're prepared to give us um a stool sample, a poo a poo sample, and they also give us a mouth swab. So the kind of things we do with that is to kind of interrogate the key hypotheses about possible shared pathways. So if we start with the with the poo sample, there's an idea out there that one of the things that happens in these post viral conditions

is that there's there's disturbance of the gut microbiota and that you um shift bacterial species and shift over to ones that are that are making their own kind of their own kind of mediators, their own kind of short chain fatty acids, and that they affect regulation of the immune system.

So we'll be doing a ton of work sequencing genes for bacteria and analyzing the things that they make and looking for common pathways there and how they feed into the immune system. We're also very keen on the idea that one of the things that happens as a consequence of a viral infection is that you trigger autoimmunity. So we'll be using really fancy techniques.

to try and probe for like repertoires of antibodies and cells that recognize self-tissues and could be mediating a kind of autoimmune disease underpinning these things. Why are we researching these two conditions together? Well, we you know, we called this new project and this new proposal Rosetta Stone for obvious reasons in terms of the ability of, you know, one language to decode the other language.

because as time went by over the last what five years of working on long covid, I think we realised and I start to realised that we were to some extent reinventing the wheel and finding things out that people had talked about in M E for years before and felt they hadn't been listened to about. And I think the point we've come to in general in thinking about long covid is that what we're talking about here is specific example of a virus, in this case SARS CoV two.

that causes long term persistent symptoms that go on on long after the acute infection, which is similar to many other examples that have been around that we've known about for years and maybe the one to illuminate all the others. But we're thinking about a kind of umbrella term for lots of these

persistent viral conditions. The big issue amongst people with with ME has been diagnosis. With long COVID, have we found ways of of finding in the body a signal of the condition? So so I'm hesitating all kinds of ki kind of yes, okay. So so obviously, you know, the the the word that people use in this connection is biomarkers and we need biomarkers because we need diagnostic tests for everything, don't we? So if you were to do a a search for how many um peer reviewed publications there've been

proposing agreed biomarkers for long COVID, you'd come up with a number of several hundred. And some of them I think are, you know, a good biomarkers and look solid to me. But if you can hear kind of hesitation in my voice, it's because it's usually an immunology. We've failed to um To achieve consensus, to do well enough at knocking heads together and getting the answer rather than loads of answers. And I think the way that I feel and lots of people feel in the field at the moment.

is we need to do that that knocking of heads together. Yeah. We need to kind of organize the international workshop where we pull together a lot of samples from thousands and thousands of people with long COVID and say, you know, never mind the eight hundred answers that got published in the medical literature. find us four or five answers that could be a test in every GP surgery in the country. And I think that's that's the kind of you know transition point we need that we're almost at.

And if we had that, would there then be an overlap with ME? Or would it mean for people with ME if there was a blood test you could do? Yeah, there's no guarantee that the perfect long COVID test has to be the perfect ME test. But you know, obviously the whole kind of rationale for this new project that we're doing is that there is enormous overlap.

And indeed, you know, the majority of the people who have long COVID would meet the criteria for ME. So you could almost think of long COVID as being a specific case of ME where we just happen to know the virus that's triggered it. Imagine if there was a a laboratory test that you could tick, that you could order that came back yes or no, and you know, it got you sent to the appropriate clinic. You know, that would be transformative.

Is that realistically possible? Isn't there a problem that things like long COVID are by their own very definition poorly defined? That we've got people who have these really debilitating persistent long term symptoms. But we've also got people grouped in it who are simply taking longer to recover from an infection for whatever reason. No, I I don't really buy into that. I mean so

One of the sort of underpinnings of your question is that it's a diverse condition, yeah. It's hard to pin down'cause it's heterogeneous because the elderly man from the first wave of the COVID pandemic who's still got brain fog looks so different to the sixteen year old from the Omicron wave who's got gastrosymptoms. And yet I think one of the things that both ME and long COVID have suffered from is being multisystem complex diseases.

where it's easy for people to throw up their hands and say, well, they're too complex, you know, happen is how can this be a thing? And the answer is, you know, in in in medicine, we deal with multi-system complex diseases all the time, don't we? It's just a matter of the will to grapple with them. If you'd never heard before of lupus,

you'd say, what are you talking about? You know, how can there be this kind of strange nebulous disease that gives you a face rash and CNS symptoms and respiratory symptoms and renal symptoms and on and on. And yet, you know, there is a disease like that. It's called lupus and it's caused by a very specific mechanism. So, you know, we're on the trail of the specific mechanism or mephisms that drive these processes in long COVID NME. That was Professor Danny Altman from Imperial College London.

A reminder you're listening to BBC Inside Science from the BBC World Service with me, Tom Whipple. time for a great deal on a new Honda. It's time to take an adventure with rugged capability and commanding style. It's time for powerful performance. Plus, plenty of room inside. Start your journey in a brand new vehicle. Check out the Honda Ridgeline. or CRB. See Dealer for financing details. Need to know about once upon a These grow so quickly.

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And it seems he's been catching up with a visitor we know is on its way, but is certainly taking a while to get here.

I'm gonna take you back a year to when a lot of us were beginning to hear about Asteroid 2024 YR4, just seen in the dying days of 2024, which seemed to be on course to buzz or even hit the Earth in 2032. The danger briefly ranked level three on the Torino scale of planetary defence as astronomers tried to refine their estimations of its approximately four year orbit around the sun.

as Patrick Michel of Cote d'Azure Observatory told BBC Science in Action in February. The challenge is to be able to track it. And for the moment, given the uncertainty that we have Two percent of the trajectories lead to a collision with the Earth in twenty thirty two. I mean just to be clear, you you've seen this now for about I guess fifty days, and you're extrapolating that motion forwards by seven years and you're saying at that point.

you've got a pretty good idea of how close it can come to earth and it may even get uh too close. Absolutely. The key point is to observation it and that's what we are doing, pushing the limit of the observations. The good news is that we got time with the James Webb Space Telescope, you know, this amazing telescope. And it will be able to tell us what is its size with an accuracy of 10%. And it can observe it until May.

So until May we may be able to uh track better its trajectory but maybe before we will have already eliminated the impact probability.

that there is an impact with the Earth in twenty thirty two. At the very least this was a real time exercise in planetary defence, contemplating the options if Earth were the target, whether to attempt to deflect the asteroid during the intervening years, for example. And though Why R4 wouldn't wipe out the planet, it could do real damage. The one that killed the dinosaurs was ten kilometers in size, right? This one is much smaller than a football stadium.

Si cela vient à nous, nous avons au moins un exemple, l'explosion d'un bolide de ce size au 13 juin 1908 vers le forest de la Tunguska en Siberia. And that pulverized two thousand kilometers of forest. So essentially if an object of this size explode over, you know, London or Paris, basically the whole city is affected. In the event, further observations narrowed by our force future path and put the Earth in the clear.

And I thought that was the end of the story. It's been too distant and faint for anyone to see since May twenty twenty five. But though the threat to Earth has faded, the Moon remains in the target zone, with a four percent chance of impact in twenty thirty-two. And as I heard at a recent geosciences conference with moon missions on the rise,

That could extend the concept of planetary defense. There are some questions if it were to hit the moon or if something were to hit the moon, if there are bases on the moon, if there are, you know, lunar mining rigs. Is that part of planetary defence? This is Andy Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University. In many ways, Patrick Michel's opposite number in the USA.

Expert in planetary defense who helped lead NASA's asteroid deflection experiment, Dart. There are some people that feel like, look, planetary defense is just the Earth. Other people say, No, no, if we have activity on the moon we have to kind of protect that as well. And if you have impacts on the moon that kick up a lot of debris

that debris could make it to the satellites orbiting the Earth could make it. So it'd just it would throw up ejector all over the place. If yes, and and some of it could make its way, some people are thinking, all the way to the the communication satellites on Earth. I don't think people imagine that it would take them out, but it might kind of shorten their lifetime. But there is this philosophical question of Is defending the moon part of planetary defence?

Stay tuned for possible news in February. Andy Rifkin has booked time then with the James Webb telescope. in the hope it might just catch a glimpse of twenty twenty four YR4, giving astronomers a new point on the asteroid's trajectory. A pixel this way or that could make all the difference to its fate on December the twenty-second, twenty thirty-two.

And though there may be downsides to a lunar impact, here on Earth it might briefly brighten the December sky. I honestly think anyone who's on the right side of the Earth and has a clear view would see this. intensely bright flash and it would be unprecedented in human history that you'd see a flash I mean that would be fantastic. I'm in favor of a moon impact myself. You know, honestly, a lot of uh basically everyone we talk about it with also is.

It's hard to root against. Obviously every indication is that we would be a hundred percent safe. So I think that's why people are rooting to be able to see this. And to be honest, There could be some great science to go alongside that spectacle. Let's hope Andy Rifkin and the JWST get a good sighting in February.

Thanks, Roland. And if you want to hear more on twenty twenty four YR four and the American Geosciences Conference Rowland attended, Do tune in to Discovery here on the BBC World Service this coming Monday. Now, Lizzie Gibney is here for the section where we discuss some of the other week's science news. Lizzie, what have you got?

Okay, so we've got two uh journal articles to discuss that we've written about at Nature this week. The first one is a synthetic skin that can camouflage you on demand, so changing both colour and texture, and it's inspired by octopuses. I don't know if you've ever seen the way octopuses can do this. They really quickly change colour but also can become rough and bumpy so that they merge in with the rocks that they're hiding behind or near.

And then they can flip back again. It's kind of pretty amazing to see them do it. And they use like specialized cells and muscle fibres in their skin, but researchers have found a synthetic way to do it. And the key to it almost sounds like relatively simple. They use like a polymer. that puffs up when it's in water, but then shrinks back down again when the water is not there. And they can kind of etch into that polymer.

in a way that controls exactly how much it puffs up and and swells. So you can like draw onto this skin like a relief map that then just pops up when you add water. So it can go from being like a a shiny skin to like this kind of matte. pattern just by adding a little drop of water. Now you should have hopefully a video where you can see that.

happening. It's pretty amazing how quickly it happens and and and returns again. Yeah, so look I I'm I'm looking at this video and it's a it's a colour change video, so as well as the r relief change one and I'm seeing Orange slowly changing uh to something I'm just going to oh it's going to blue and it's going doty and it looks it looks extremely different. It also I have to say looks like It is highly magnified that we're not looking at something that could

I I could wear as a jumper uh and sort of hide from my enemies with just yet? So there are limitations. The main one is that you control it with water and you know, that can be quite fiddly to do. Um is you know, it'd be easier if it was just something like an electronic switch that you could flip. Uh but then there are also more practical potential use as well, like in buildings, you could use it to make energy efficient buildings.

So they could go from being shiny and reflective in the daytime and then um you know so keeping cool and then at night time be matte and absorbent. Uh look, I w I want to talk about chess because I was a

Secret geeky player when I was a child, and in perhaps an even more secret one now. There is a paper out on chess nine sixty. Now, this is something that was created by the noted world champion and noted anti-sea mite Bobby Fisher in the 1990s. And the idea is you shuffle the pieces on the back row of the chessboard.

And the reason he wanted to do this is because it means you can't prepare. If you have a chess board that can be in in 960 different positions, it means you can't spend weeks practicing your openings and chess. ceases to become this sort of massive cramming thing about remembering moves at the beginning.

Um now the reason that I think this is really interesting now is because Magnus Carlson, who generally thought of as the best chess player who ev ever lived, But interestingly is no longer the world champion, largely because he just doesn't want To do all of the work, all of the cramming for what should be a cerebral test.

And so he's got really into chess 960. And now this particular paper is uh the congruence of that and the arrival of these chess engines that can superhuman can tell you exactly how good a position is. They have gone through all 960 positions. And evaluated how much they advantage black, how much they advantage white.

and also how complicated they are. And what they found is that all of the positions basically advantage white, but that's exactly the same with the current setup. But also the current setup we have that everyone's used to Is utterly unremarkable. We didn't alight on it because it's particularly stable, particularly equal, or particularly something where where there's a range of possible openings. It's just chance.

Um so I hope this will be a way to to make chess nine sixty work'cause I'm sort of with Magnus Carlson on this. I think it'd be

a gr a great way to improve the game. Yeah, I like a new kind of injection into life for this quite, you know, ancient game. Um, tell us you laugh what. I think this has something to do with arrows. Yes, it is. So this is a paper in science advances. So Scientists have found the first direct evidence of ancient humans, hunter-gatherers, using poison tips on their arrows in their hunts. So they found um on these little kind of sharp stone flakes in Quasi-Lunital in South Africa in this lake.

hollowed out rock shelter, these specimens from sixty thousand years ago, and they had traces of a a toxin called bupanidrine, uh that comes from a from a plant. And this is way older than the previous example, previous oldest example we had, which was from about 6,700 years ago. So we know that. These early humans were were hunting with poison tipped arrows long before the previous evidence had suggested.

That's extraordinary. So they the the sort of the cognitive steps that have to go on. You've got to work out how to make uh weapon and then you've got to work out that something's toxic and then you've got to put it on and then well presumably they'd chase large large herbivores and they'd know they only had to get one arrow hit. And that would be enough to incapacitate them. Well, this is the thing as well. So this particular toxin is um delayed action, so it takes a while to work.

So one of the implications of this study is that they were not only able to um to find the plant, turn it into the poison, which is quite hard to do and obviously dangerous as well, then they've also got to plan their hunt and strategize how to capture prey that might take an hour before it before it falls over. So

It suggests that even sixty thousand years ago the early humans were were pretty technologically advanced, I'd say. Fabulous. Well look, that's all from us for now. You have been listening to BBC Inside Science from the BBC World Surface. The producers were Claire Salisbury, Kate White, Tim Dodd and Alex Mansfield. Until next time, it's bye from me and it's bye from Lizzie. Goodbye.