Where Your Smartphone Juice Comes From
Thanks to its extraordinary terrain, Chile is sitting on the world’s largest deposits of lithium, the element that powers the modern world.
Where Your Smart Phone Juice Comes From
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Chile’s Atacama Desert is the driest place on earth by rainfall. It’s a vast, barren wasteland better suited to vicunas than humans.
As it happens, the Atacama is also packed full of minerals that have seeped into the ground from the Andes Mountains over millions of years. This has left Chile with the world’s largest deposits of lithium, the key element in the batteries that go into our smartphones, laptops, and electric cars.