Have you ever asked yourself how you interact with mineral resources in everyday life? They are everywhere. As soon as you wake up. At breakfast. On the way to school.
In the classroom. On your lunch break. In the computer room.
In the street, when you're having fun, at dinner time, in the bathroom, and when you go to bed. Mineral resources are precious and essential to daily life. Mineral resources are used in all sectors of activity, valuable for their incredibly diverse physical and chemical properties, such as, for example, solidity. conductivity, color.
This is why the objects we use daily are packed with a range of different mineral resources. Do you know, for example, how many different minerals are contained in an alarm clock, a bicycle, or a digital tablet, a can, a car, a tube of toothpaste? Mineral resources are necessary to create objects we use every day.
Among the main mineral resources used, we can mention Minerals containing copper, as this metal has excellent conductive properties. Minerals containing cobalt, as this improves power storage in electric vehicle batteries. Minerals containing tungsten, as it is highly resistant. Rare earth elements, as they contribute to energy transition. and sand, which is the third most consumed substance by mankind.
Now let's turn to the questions and answers. Where do mineral resources come from? Mineral resources come from underground, extracted from mines and quarries by humans. The geologist is specialized in the study of underground matter. Mineral resources are extracted from quarries, particularly for sand, gravel, rocks, or from mines, to extract gold, copper or iron for example.
The two types of mining operations are open pit surface mining, carving out exposed large-scale pits, and underground mining by drilling tunnels to access deposits. Both open pit and underground mining can reach on average a few hundred meters below ground, while quarries on average only reach tens of meters in depth. The location of mines and quarries is not random, as it is by studying the nature of the underground and its deposits that we determine the best approach. In other words, geology. How are mineral resources created?
Mountains, basins and oceans are created by the movement of tectonic plates. For example, when two tectonic plates collide, this can form a mountain range. And when certain specific conditions are met in terms of pressure and temperature, This can form mineral deposits. The dynamic nature of Earth's geological movements creates deposits.
And what are mineral resources used for? Mineral resources are in just about everything, even where you least expect them. For example, they can be found in medication, constructions, particularly in walls, glassware, tiles, garden furniture, vehicles, pastel crayons, even paper.
But are mineral resources really indispensable? Yes, these are indispensable at the moment. We have not yet found any alternatives to these resources, as they provide a diversity of functions that is hard to match.
For this reason, they must be used responsibly and within reason. Mineral resources available today took tens to hundreds of millions of years to form. To put things in perspective, Consider that the quantity of minerals man has extracted in the past century is equivalent to the quantity extracted since man first appeared on Earth a few tens of thousands of years ago.
A staggering amount. The central issue, aside that of available resources, is access to deposits in the future, which are increasingly deep underground and complicated to extract, always requiring more advanced and expensive technology. We need to design our products to be more sustainable and recycle already extracted materials to preserve our mineral resources.