Welcome back to another edition of Molecular Mondays, a special biweekly series here on Planet Pailly combining two of my least favorite things: chemistry and Mondays.
These past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot and learning a lot about lithium, because I’m a science fiction writer and I need to know stuff about this particular element for worldbuilding purposes. Except so far, I seem to be doing more world-destroying than worldbuilding.
Lithium is the kind of element that tends to form really strong chemical bonds—so strong that once lithium bonds to other elements, it can be really difficult to make it let go.
In fact Johan Arfwedson, the chemist who discovered lithium, was never able to isolate the element by itself. He could only infer its existence based on the unusually bright crimson color produced when a lithium-containing compound was burned (in other words, he was only able to identify it spectroscopically).
Given how hard it is to isolate lithium, I assumed lithium mining must be an arduous task. And it probably would be if we had to extract it directly from rock; but over three quarters of the world’s commercially available lithium does not come from rock. It comes from brine.
Pockets of water beneath the Earth’s surface can, over long periods of time, leech minerals like lithium out of the surrounding rock. The lithium intermingles with other elements in the water, creating lithium salts, and gradually as the water gets saltier and saltier it turns into lithium brine.
All we have to do is dredge that briny water up out of the ground, pour it into an artificial pool, and leave it out under strong sunlight. When the water part of the brine evaporates away, we’re left with lots and lots of lithium salts (and other kinds of salt too, but for our purposes we only care about the lithium salts). Apparently this is one of the easiest mining processes around, and also one of the least harmful to the environment.
I still have more research to do on this subject, but at least now I know my fictional lithium-rich moon would not necessarily burst into flames just because there’s water.
Planet Pailly 
Its interesting how life on other planets evolve and the set of circumstances required for procreation. To think that us mere humans started out as amino acids much like tadpoles floating around in a puddle of goo. Earthers are an amazing miracle of walking and talking bags of water, hehe.
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If there’s life on Mars, it is almost certainly swimming around in subsurface pools of brine. Probably not lithium brine, but still… something very similar to the brine pools we have here on Earth. That’s something I was thinking about while I wrote this post, and maybe I’ll write more about that at a later date.
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You really make it seem really easy along with your presentation but I in finding this matter to be really something which I believe I’d
by no means understand. It sort of feels too complicated and very
vast for me. I’m looking ahead in your subsequent post,
I will attempt to get the dangle of it!
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I guess these Molecular Monday posts aren’t always the most reader friendly. Chemistry is such a hard subject, and I’m not particular good at it. However, chemistry has become the foundation for a lot of other things I do both here on my blog and in my science fiction writing, so I do my best to stick to it.
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on the other hand, I now how to blow up a lithium rich moon if I ever feel the need to become an intergalactic supervillain.
Which seems unlikely.
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It’s good to keep your career options open.
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