While the discovery has the potential to alter the dynamics of the global market for the metals, the difficulty of extracting presents a major challenge.

The Japanese team found deep-sea mud containing high concentrations of rare-earth elements and yttrium at numerous sites throughout the southeastern and north-central parts of the Pacific Ocean, the journal said in its online edition over the weekend.

“We estimate that an area of just one square kilometer, surrounding one of the sampling sites, could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements,” team leader Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth sciences at Tokyo University, wrote in the report.

Rare-earth minerals are used in a variety of high-technology products such as electronics, magnets and batteries used in hybrid automobiles and mobile phones.

The minerals are recoverable from the mud by acid leaching, making deep-sea mud a highly promising and potentially huge resource for these elements.

The Japanese team estimated the size of the discovery at around 80 billion to 100 billion metric tons, nearly a thousand times more than current proven reserves of 110 million tons as estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Those proven reserves are mostly in China, Russia and the U.S. But China is by far the biggest miner of rare-earth minerals on a commercial scale, making it a dominant supplier with around 95% of the global market. Recent moves by Beijing to restrict exports of rare-earth materials have pushed prices of these minerals up around tenfold from a year ago, spurring searches for alternative sources of supply.

Chinese exports of rare-earth materials in the first five months of this year fell 8.8% from a year earlier, while revenue more than tripled to $1.6 billion.

The commercial viability of mining the minerals from the Pacific remains a question. “Accessing the treasure trove of key elements on the ocean floor will be very expensive and potentially harmful to sea-floor ecology,” Nature Geoscience said in a related article.

The lower concentrations at Chinese mines are economically viable because the material is easier to access. “That is not true for mud located below four or five kilometers of water, which would require expensive ship time and equipment to pull up,” Gareth Hatch, a founder of the Technology Metals Research consulting firm in Carpentersville, Ill., told the journal. “People talk about mining on the asteroids or the moon. This isn’t that hard, but it’s similar,” Mr. Hatch said. “There are better options.”

An official with a Japanese rare-metal trading house said that commercialization could take up to 20 years. “We knew before there were likely such resources on the sea floor, and we still face the challenges of how the mining rights would be divvied up and how the technological issues would be resolved,” the official said.

Despite their name, the minerals aren’t particularly rare. The British Geological Survey has identified 53 separate deposits around the world.

Some deposits are considerably larger than those identified by the Japanese team. A one-square-kilometer section of ocean floor near Hawaii with 25,000 tons of rare-earth elements is dwarfed by Lynas Corporation Ltd.’s Mount Weld deposit in Western Australia, which contains 1.4 million tons of rare-earth oxides in a comparable area.

Nautilus Minerals Inc. says deep-sea mining needn’t be significantly more difficult than work currently undertaken by offshore petroleum companies and undersea cable operators. Nautilus hopes to start mining copper from 1,600 meters below the surface in the Bismarck Sea, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, starting at the end of 2013.

“The technology we’re developing is an adaptation of existing technologies. We’re not remaking the wheel here,” said Joe Dowling, a company spokesman.

By Denny Kurien (c) 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Photo: Rare earth oxides of praseodymium, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium and gadolinium via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Come aboard as the VBS crew takes a cruise to the Northern Gyre in the Pacific Ocean, a spot where currents spin and cycle, churning up tons of plastic into a giant pool of chemical soup, flecked with bits and whole chunks of refuse that cannot biodegrade.

Today, President Bush will designate vast stretches of American-controlled Pacific Ocean including islands, reefs surface waters and sea floor as marine national monuments that will serve to limit fishing, mining, oil exploration and other kinds of commercial activities in the designated areas.  Areas of interest include parts of the Mariana Trench (shown above) and a string of reefs near the Equator and American Samoa.

According to the New York Times:

The islands, atolls, reefs and underwater mountain ranges offer unique habitat to hundreds of rare species of birds and fish. Among them are tropicbirds, boobies, frigate birds, terns, noddies, petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses, according to environmental groups who pushed for the protection. It is also the habitat of the rare Micronesian megapode, a bird that incubates its eggs using subterranean volcanic heat.

The declaration came after two years of study and relatively modest opposition from commercial and recreational fishing groups and some officials in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, who feared it would throttle future economic development.

The area of the protected zones will total 195,280 square miles.  Early in 2006, Bush also declared a 139,000 square mile expanse of ocean northwest of the Hawaiian Islands known as the Paphanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.  Bush’s actions today will mean he has done more to protect areas of the world’s oceans than any other person in history.

Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said President Bush’s action would preserve huge ocean areas for future generations and would not conflict with military activities or freedom of navigation.

UPDATE:

Whitehouse.gov has posted yesterday speech from President Bush on conservation and the environment.  The first few expcerts are below:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. Please be seated. Thank you for coming, and Happy New Year. Laura and I thank all of our distinguished guests, starting with members of my Cabinet – Secretary Kempthorne, Secretary Gutierrez, Administrator Johnson. Admiral, thank you for coming today. We’re proud you’re here. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here. Other members of the administration who have joined us. Members of the conservation community, we’re glad you’re here.

Governor, I am proud you’re here. Thank you for coming. And Josie is with you. Representatives from — by the way, Northern Mariana Islands — Governor. Just in case you don’t know him. (Laughter.) We know him — and we like him. And all the representatives from America Samoa, really appreciate you all coming. Apologize for the weather, but I don’t apologize for the policy, because we’re fixing to do some fabulous policy.

It’s interesting that we’re gathered a few steps from the office once occupied by a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Theodore Roosevelt. Not long after he left the position, he was back on these grounds as the 26th President of the United States. And exactly a hundred years ago, he embarked on his final weeks as the President — something I can relate to. (Laughter.) READ FULL SPEECH