The McDermitt Caldera on the Oregon-Nevada border may be the largest lithium deposit on Earth. So, how did it get there?
eruption that could form a caldera. This happened about 16.3 million years when the McDermitt caldera was formed during an eruption that would rival the biggest from the modern Yellowstone caldera.
Thanks to the magma being formed partially by incorporating the North American crust underneath the area, elements like lithium were enriched in the molten rock. Once the eruption happened, half of that 1000 cubic kilometers spilled out away from the area as pyroclastic flows while the other half fell into the caldera formed by the collapse of the land during the eruption.
Layers of sediment from a lake that formed in the McDermitt Caldera. Credit: Henry et al. , Geosphere. Now you have ~500 cubic kilometre of hot volcanic debris in a closed basin . As it begins to cool, the basin fills with water and sediment, leaching some of the lithium out of the volcanic debris and enriching it in the sediment. Then, as volcanism continuing in the caldera, hot fluids come up through faults and fractures, leaching even more lithium and keeping parts of the sediment warm.
In doing so, you perform a magic trip. You convert one type of magnesium rich clay into a lithium rich clay . The clays are being made by the breakdown of volcanic glass and minerals in the caldera, but then they get enriched in lithium due to hydrothermal alteration -- the process where heated fluids can add or remove elements.In the end, the McDermitt caldera area has clays that are upwards of 5 to 12 weight percent lithium! That is a lot of lithium concentrated into these clay minerals.
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