ENDORHEIC BASIN RESOURCES: EXPLORING RARE EARTH ELEMENTS, LITHIUM, AND TRANSIENT WATER FROM UTAH’S SEVIER LAKE TO SPAIN’S CANARY ISLANDS AND ANTARCTICA’S DRY VALLEYS

“Sedimentary basins serve as Earth's libraries—each stratigraphic succession an archive of the (oftentimes complex) competing or compounding interplays of dynamic tectonic, climatic, and eustatic controls on sedimentation at local to global scales.” — Burton (2024)*

What's more, terminal basin “sinks” are some of Earth's preeminent resource accumulators. In sediment routing systems, material moves from “source” (as suspended particles; as dissolved ions and molecules; as colloidal substances) to an ultimate depositional “sink.” Deposited materials accumulating in basins may include coarser-grained sediments suitable as resource reservoirs (e.g., as aquifers, oil/gas reservoirs, targets for CO₂ storage) and finer-grained fractions serving as both host and source of resources (e.g., as host of ion-adsorption kaolinite- and halloysite-rich rare earth element deposits; as smectite- or illite-rich claystone-hosted lithium deposits; as organic matter-rich petroleum source rock). Here, I share progress on several field-based investigations of resource-relevant systems hosted in endorheic basins in desert regions. Field sites with a focus on lithium behavior include Koehn Lake (Mojave Desert, USA) and Sevier Lake (Sevier Desert, USA), while sites with a focus on rare earth element behavior center on Antarctic brine ponds in the McMurdo Dry Valleys extreme polar desert. Numerous volcanic and coastal field sites across Spain's Canary Islands are also explored (including Fuerteventura's Calderón Hondo and Gairía Caldera, Lanzarote's Montaña Mazo, and sites across the islands of Gran Canaria and El Hierro). Overall, ongoing investigations provide insight into the natural behavior of elemental components relevant to critical resource exploration (and accordingly, to energy transitions and climate mitigation). Furthermore, such diverse work highlights the continued importance of basin-scale analysis and investigation across temporal and spatial scales—whether modeling 100 km-scale basin evolution over tens of million years or modeling cm-scale to nm-scale chemical alteration processes minute-by-minute and second-by-second in the lab, or collecting data (on systems modern and ancient) at km- and 100 m-scale down to cm- and mm-scale (both across and beneath land surfaces) in the field.

*www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/oceandrilling2024/pdf/6028.pdf