Bad news for the Pacific Ocean. Since mining companies have more than enough problems mining on land, this is going to be a disaster since it's in a more difficult environment and likely to be far from media attention.
"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.
The discovery was made by a team led by Kato and including researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
They found the minerals in sea mud extracted from depths of 3,500 to 6,000 meters (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface at 78 locations. One-third of the sites yielded rich contents of rare earths and the metal yttrium, Kato said in a telephone interview.
