Summary
The good news A wonder metal that fires your phone, iPod and shiny new electric car is so clean it may save the planet
The bad news More than half of the world's lithium is beneath this Bolivian desert... and getting it is so dirty it inspired the latest Bond plotSee the full content of this document
Extract
The Battle for the 3rd Element
Darkness falls across the Andes, turning the distant snow caps from blinding white to nothingness in the blink of an eye. From the east, the night races across the bleak Altiplano towards us, as the temperature plummets to below zero, leaving the windswept emptiness of the planet's largest salt plain in a vast cold shadow. Above our heads, the sky changes to a hazy and then a deep blue hue, revealing the clearest view of the Milky Way to be found anywhere on Earth..
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon, on July 20, 1969, one of the first sights they encountered from space was the wilderness where we stand. As the Earth turned they were captivated by a vast patch of white across the lower South American continent, which they instantly took to be glacial but was in fact southern Bolivia's Salar De Uyuni, a little- known but expansive desert of cactus, rainwater lagoons and ten billion tons of salt covering nearly 5,000 square miles.Since then the salt plain has remained a largely fo...See the full content of this document
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