UDLS

Digging up some rocks from two random points along the surface of the earth, you are likely to find vastly different concentrations of minerals. If it wasn't for this non-uniformity in mineral concentrations, many materials essential for electronics and other products would not be possible to accumulate. For example, silver has a concentration of 0.070 parts per million in the earth's crust. To mine silver in a uniform concentration earth, we would need to dig up and process ~15 tonnes of rock to get a single gram of silver. We will talk about the importance of mineral deposits and go through some peculiar ways in which particular materials can concentrate.