When the Queensland state government sent Anita Parbhakar-Fox to the remote town of Mt Isa in the Australian outback to hunt for cobalt in copper mine waste, the geology professor had high expectations.
But when she tested the samples back at her lab at the University of Queensland she was shocked. One reading showed 7,000 parts of cobalt per million — more than 200 times cobalt’s average presence in the earth’s crust.
“I nearly fell off my chair when I got that piece of data,” she said, explaining that 300 ppm is enough to get miners excited. “If you’ve got 7,000 ppm, that’s pretty juicy. It was a eureka moment.”
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