Japan's Rare Earths Island

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-30

[00:00:02]In 2010, the People's Republic of China banned exports of rare earths to Japan due to a territorial dispute.

[00:00:10]After that, the Japanese government began developing alternate sources of rare earths, signing deals with Australia and Brazil.

[00:00:18]The most intriguing potential source, however, lies beneath the deep-sea sediments surrounding a tiny Japanese island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

[00:00:28]In February 2026, the Japanese government reported the first successful test extraction of this deep-sea mud thousands of meters underneath the surface.

[00:00:39]In today's video, a brief look at Japan's rare earths island.

[00:00:45]I have covered the rare earths in prior videos. I have before described them as like technology vitamins. We don't need a lot of them, but nothing works without them. Despite the name, they're not that rare. It's the processing capability and capacity that's rare. Yada, yada, yada.

[00:01:03]After the 2010 rare earths crisis, the Japanese government began searching for alternate sources.

[00:01:09]A research group led by Professor Yasuhiro Kato of the University of Tokyo went through 2,000 sediment core samples from 78 sites in the Pacific Ocean. They called it the International Deep Sea Drilling Project.

[00:01:23]In June 2011, the Japanese government announced that there existed substantial rare earths reserves in both the Eastern South Pacific and Central North Pacific Ocean regions.

[00:01:35]And at one such rare earths sediment deposit laid within the exclusive economic zone of a remote island called Minamitorishima Island.

[00:01:45]Minamitorishima is Japan's most eastern lying territory. The island is the only one east of the Japan Trench. It sits about 1,211 miles from Tokyo and 630 miles from the closest Japanese island.

[00:02:00]It is a coral atoll island less than a square mile large and 9 m above the water. The island is covered in trees and grass and not much lives there except for a species of gecko and seabirds.

[00:02:14]The history of how Japan came into possession of this random island in the middle of nowhere is pretty fascinating.

[00:02:20]A lot of it had to do with bird poop.

[00:02:23]The spot has apparently been sighted by various ships throughout time, perhaps going as far back as the 1600s.

[00:02:31]But it was only first visited in 1864 by an American ship called the Morning Star. They stayed for a short period naming it Marcus Island. In the 1880s, various Japanese and American ships landed on the island and attempted to claim it for themselves. Mostly so they can receive the right to harvest the island's guano. At the time, people still heavily relied on bird guano as a critical agricultural fertilizer. Made quite a few island countries rich back in the day.

[00:03:04]In 1889, the American Captain Andrew Ambrose Rosehill sailed to Marcus Island. He raised an American flag on the island's only coconut tree, left a sign, and then sailed back to apply for guano rights. The US Department of State did not acknowledge this request and Rosehill does nothing more.

[00:03:23]In 1896, a Japanese drifted onto the island via some storm or whatever and claimed it for Japan. He declared that he had brought 20 or so Japanese settlers to the island and named it Minami Torishima. The Japanese government acknowledged his claim and posted it.

[00:03:40]Captain Rosehill heard about this and raised money from Hawaiian plantation lords to harvest the area's bird poop.

[00:03:47]He commissions a ship to stop by the island and take samples, but that ship's crew found themselves blocked by the Japanese now living on the island. So, in July 1902, he sails for the island on a schooner intending to enforce his claim.

[00:04:04]The Japanese hear about this and send a letter outlining their own position.

[00:04:08]They also send a warship. 12 days after Rosehill set sail, ostensibly to enforce their claim with arms.

[00:04:17]The Americans hear about this and send their own warship. The idea being to protect the captain and enforce any legitimate claims. Thus, we have a captain and two warships from opposite sides of the Pacific racing towards a pile of bird poop in the ocean.

[00:04:34]The Japanese reach the island first and prevent Rosehill from landing on the island. And in the end, the US government declined to back Rosehill's claim. Why? Mostly pragmatism.

[00:04:45]Public perception on this kerfuffle was muted. If anything, most seemed to feel that Rosehill's claim was fairly weak compared to Japan's. Rosehill put up a flag, left, and did nothing for years after. The Japanese landed actual settlers onto the island.

[00:05:01]And nobody felt it was worth antagonizing the Japanese, who the Americans wanted to curry favor with, by evicting them so that someone else can mine the guano there and get rich.

[00:05:12]Moreover, the US had their own far more strategic islands that they sought to hold. Midway, Guam, and the Wake Islands. Disrespecting Japan's claim opened the door to the possibility of the same thing happening to them.

[00:05:27]So, the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. Rosehill thus returned having lost some amount of money and petitioning the Japanese for compensation. I don't think he got it.

[00:05:38]After that, Japan set up a guano and bird feather harvesting facility.

[00:05:43]At its peak, 50 people lived on this island, which is kind of amazing. But after 19 of them died due to dysentery, resources and population declined, and by 1935, the island became uninhabited again.

[00:05:58]During World War II, the Japanese navy fortified the island. They likely anticipated a possible land invasion at some point. But while the allies bombed it several times, killing about 191 soldiers in the process, they never attempted such a landing.

[00:06:15]After the war, the Americans repatriated the soldiers and took over the renamed Marcus Island.

[00:06:21]There, they built a small navigation weather station and airstrip, occupying it for the next few decades. The soldiers and staff there seemed to have a good time exploring the Japanese fortifications, fishing the rich waters, and dodging mako sharks. Actually, the latter doesn't sound so much a good time.

[00:06:40]Finally, in 1968, the United States returned the island to Japan, along with Iwo Jima and the Bonin Islands. This was a major diplomatic step towards the eventual return of Okinawa a few years later.

[00:06:54]The US Coast Guard did retain a powerful radio transmitter there, the Marcus Island Loran C transmitter. It's a pre-GPS boats can use its signals to triangulate their location on the earth.

[00:07:08]That was transferred to the Japan Coast Guard in 1993.

[00:07:13]In 2009, Japan turned off the transmitting station due to the widespread use of GPS and designated the area a bird sanctuary. I am sure the birds appreciated that.

[00:07:25]Soon afterwards, the island seemed destined to fade into obscurity. The only people living there were a small detachment of rotating staff from the Self-Defense Force and the weather agency. Then, the rare earth survey came calling.

[00:07:40]So, how did the mud surrounding this island come to have so much rare earth?

[00:07:44]As we all know, and people keep repeating, the rare earth elements are not actually that rare. They're just hard to separate. So, when looking for deposits, we're looking for geological situations where those elements have been collected and accumulated.

[00:07:59]For example, deposits in the southern China region exist because of a unique set of circumstances. Rocks enriched with rare earths get weathered down by rain, releasing trace elements. Those elements then leach into the clays, which systematically absorb them.

[00:08:16]In the case of the island mud, this is what we think happened. And it has to do with fish bones. When fish die, their bodies sink to the ocean floor. I know, breaking news alert. Their teeth and bones contain calcium phosphate. So, when that falls to the bottom and decays, we start getting large amounts of calcium phosphate in the mud.

[00:08:37]This calcium phosphate is basically the sponge and magnet for certain rare earths, binding to elements floating around in the sea in trace amounts.

[00:08:46]Thus, over geological time scales, we get significant accumulations of rare earths. These layers are relatively shallow, about 10 m below the floor, and in certain locations they can get quite rich.

[00:09:00]There are two types of rare earths, light and heavy. The light rare earths have lower atomic numbers and range from lanthanum to samarium. Cerium and neodymium, the stuff they use for magnets, are light rare earths.

[00:09:13]And then you got the denser heavy rare earths, which go from europium to lutetium. This is where the People's Republic of China's rare earth strengths really lie. The lighter elements can be found in other locations, though again, refining capacity is not so common. But with regards to the heavy elements, the southern Chinese deposits have few serious competitors.

[00:09:35]So, Minami Torishima's rare earth sediments are not only rich in rare earth, anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 and even 7,000 parts per million, but also the rare earth that these sediments have are the ones that are really hard to get.

[00:09:52]When the sediment deposits first hit the mainstream media in April 2018, it was basically declared that these deposits were, quote unquote, semi-infinite, which is an oxymoron.

[00:10:04]Anyway, what is meant by that is that certain sample regions are claimed to have decades worth of supply of yttrium, europium, terbium, and dysprosium, valuable heavy rare earths. I've also seen mentions of the lighter neodymium and samarium, both used for magnets.

[00:10:22]I note, however, that all estimates of the size of the reserves assume that we can extrapolate a substantial grid area blocks of many kilometers wide with just a few samples. The geology there is quite mountainous. Reality seems that the actual amount will be very up and down.

[00:10:41]So, that is all the happy good stuff to be optimistic about, the stuff that the headlines are going to blare out. Yay, there's all these reserves down there.

[00:10:50]Now, let us drill into the real work.

[00:10:51]How do we get it? The main problem is that these are not shallow seas. The mud is only about 10 m below the sea floor, but the sea floor sits some 6,000 m underwater. To compare, the Titanic lies a mere 3,800 m deep.

[00:11:09]While we have long known that the deep sea floor harbors economically valuable minerals, the technology surrounding their extraction are not well developed.

[00:11:18]For such technologies have been developed over the past years, three do not work.

[00:11:24]The first and simplest is the submarine drag bucket. This does exactly what it says on the label. We drag a bucket across the seafloor, bring up the bucket when it's full, scrape it clean, and then drop it back down for more dragging.

[00:11:40]First proposed in the 1960s, technicians found the bucket dragging behavior difficult to control and intermittent.

[00:11:49]You lose productivity during the time when you lift and drop the bucket again.

[00:11:54]So, later was proposed a continuous line bucket system, a loop with multiple buckets constantly bringing up deep-sea sediment. It kind of works, but there were substantial risks of entangling the buckets or the buckets accidentally spilling their contents on the way up.

[00:12:13]The big overarching problem with both these bucket-based methods is that they are hilariously environmentally destructive, scarring the entire seabed for many kilometers. Like, this is Disney villainy levels of stuff. Let's Let's not do that.

[00:12:30]In the 1970s, the French developed another method called shuttlecraft mining system. There is a collecting device on the seabed that gathers minerals or ores. The ores are collected onto a shuttle that brings them to the surface.

[00:12:45]It kind of works, but it is more science fiction. You add another whole set of complicated deep-sea vehicles that can break. And can these machines actually work autonomously? How are they going to be powered? So on.

[00:13:00]Lastly, we are left with the last and most feasible technology, pulp lifting or the pipeline lift. An underwater machine on the seafloor turns the ore and mud into a seawater slurry, and that slurry is then sucked up like a milkshake through a fat pipe. By carefully controlling the slurry solids concentration, we can get a fluid that pumps up easier, requiring less energy and a thinner pipe to do so.

[00:13:27]After the slurry is brought up to the surface, it is separated out using gravity and then dewatered. This is done on Minami-Tori-shima Island itself.

[00:13:36]The silt is then put on a transport boat that brings it to a processing facility where the rare earths are leached out using hydrochloric or sulfuric acids.

[00:13:46]Many of the technical details on this are sparse and I presume it's being worked out.

[00:13:52]The environmental risks of this pulp lifting mechanism are substantial.

[00:13:56]First, there is immediate loss of whatever marine life is living on the seafloor. This includes sponges, filter feeding animals, deep-sea fish, shellfish, corals, and jellyfish.

[00:14:07]Second then will be the knock-on effects from kicking up massive amounts of silt, suffocating any flora in the area and preventing them from returning, perhaps for weeks or months on end as the silt settles.

[00:14:22]The Japanese system employs what they call a closed mining system on the ground, which they say will suppress sediment plumes. It is also said to reduce various externalities of deep-sea mining relating to light and noise pollution. How much, I'm not certain.

[00:14:38]I must admit that none of this is really pleasant, but I do want to remind you that rare earths mining on land isn't exactly wonderful, either.

[00:14:49]A key thing why Minami-Tori-shima Island is so valuable to Japan isn't that its sediments are particularly unique, though they are quite nice. It is that the deposits lie entirely within Japan's 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone.

[00:15:05]This means that a deep-sea mining project there bypasses the authority of the United Nations mandated body International Seabed Authority, which controls, authorizes, and protects the ocean seafloor bed and international deep sea.

[00:15:20]The sediments being inside Japan's own lets them apply their own environmental regulations, skipping a lot of bureaucracy and permit work.

[00:15:29]If Japan were to try to do this in international waters, they may be subject to the ISA's international environmental codes. That's going to be difficult considering that the body has not yet finalized rules for mining deep-sea mud despite several looming deadlines.

[00:15:46]The main issue is and always has been economics. Are these sediments more economically practical to produce than land-based alternatives?

[00:15:56]Frankly, early feasibility analyses of the Minami Torishima Island sediments found their extraction to be uneconomical compared to land-based alternatives. This remained the case even when richer rare earth deposits of 5,000 ppm were located. Researchers have proposed to improve the economics by adding something else to the mix, ferromanganese nodules. These are metallic clumps scattered across the seafloor laying on or under the seabed sediment. You can harvest the metals in these nodules for additional money.

[00:16:30]Even so, the economic viability of such an operation does not look good. A 2021 economic analysis using 10-year average pricing found that a 15-year project would have an IRR of 3.7% and a net present value of a $525 million loss.

[00:16:50]And that is assuming there are no serious technical hang-ups, which considering the pioneering nature of this technology will probably crop up somewhere or sometime.

[00:17:01]In 2017, Chinese researchers using Japan Oil, claimed that the operation only earns money if rare earths remain at peak 2011 prices, which were in a bubble for literally decades. And they're they're not wrong.

[00:17:18]Here I want to add that a precursory look at various rare earth prices, not a deep analysis, just I Googled it, show that outside of the magnet-related rare earths, prices are down between 30 to 80% from the 10-year price averages used for the 2021 analysis. So, price floors may be necessary.

[00:17:39]Considering that and all the money being invested into the space right now, Chinese and non-Chinese, no private investor will undertake such a project.

[00:17:48]I guess that is why the Japanese government is taking the lead. Such and strategic projects are why we do industrial policy. The successful 2026 extraction comes after years of engineering work and tests. The team designed and built the aforementioned deep-sea close mining apparatus, a 3,000-m pipe that lifts the slurry using compressed air, and an ultrasonic metrology system to monitor performance.

[00:18:15]And prior to running the on-site February 2026 test, the team did a smaller-scale, but fully integrated test in waters 2,400 m deep off the coast of Japan's Ibaraki Prefecture in 2022, successfully pumping up 70 tons of slurry a day.

[00:18:34]The government's long-term commitment to this sort of wild project is actually pretty impressive.

[00:18:40]Despite some successes and diversification, Japan still sources some 60 to 80% of its rare earths from the People's Republic of China.

[00:18:48]$500 million over 15 years seems like a fair price to pay, considering especially that the alternative would simply be not getting the rare earths.

[00:18:57]Japan also holds an ISA exploration contract for international waters many hundreds of miles off the islands of Hawaii. The work done in Minami-Tori-shima can be applied to there as well. I believe China has a contract too.

[00:19:12]Mastering deep-sea pipeline lift-style mining has other benefits. The seafloor has a great deal of other metals and minerals like gold, zinc, copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The mining technology might be applicable to that as well.

[00:19:27]With the successful February 2026 extraction test behind them, Japan now seeks to scale up the deep-sea mining trials on site. They're scheduled to begin a year later in February 2027, targeting 350 tons of rare earth sediment slurry per day.

[00:19:45]All right, everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, sign up for the Patreon, and I'll see you guys next time.