Скачать или смотреть Earth Sciences & Critical Minerals - Prof Alan Collins - Uni of Adelaide

Meet Professor Alan Collins, an earth scientist at the University of Adelaide.

Professor Collins tries make the world a better place by learning about the earth. You'd be surprised how little we know about how the earth works. It's four and a half billion years old this planet.

But the beauty of it is that we have the evidence. The evidence for how this earth works is locked up in the rocks around the planet. There are rocks in Australia that go back four billion years old and within those we can learn how to interrogate the information from the things that make up those rocks. The chemistry and mineralogy can tell us what the world was like at the time and how it's changed over the years.

While that might be super interesting, how does that make the world a better place?

Locked up within those rocks, there are some weird elements that we become incredibly fond of and incredibly attached to.

You might not even have heard of half of these such as gallium or indium. These are rare earth elements. You probably have heard of some of them like cobalt and copper.

It’s these elements that govern our society at the moment. They go into technology such as smart phones.

They also produce low carbon electricity - wind farms are full of them. Neodymium is a rare earth element that you can find within wind turbines. Batteries require rare earth elements to be efficient. Electric cars contain these elements too.

Moving towards a low-carbon, sustainable economy depends on us finding - and us being able to separate from the rocks - these elements and using them in a sustainable way.

For earth scientists such as Professor Collins, one of the big challenges is to learn about the planet and to learn about the processes that have evolved in this planet to create this habitable world we have.

How have these processes helped concentrate these elements into different parts of this world? How do we find them? How do we get them out in a sustainable and environmentally sensitive way?

Professor Collins is only doing a small amount toward this cause. It will be up to the next generation of earth scientists to really to develop these techniques and technologies and methodologies.

It's an amazing challenge. Are you up for it?

Want to pursue your scientific curiosity and passion for our earth and our environment - from geology to marine biology; and ecology to palaeontology, visit https://sciences.adelaide.edu.au/stud...