An area known as Thacker Pass on the Nevada-Oregon border is home to clay that contain tens of millions of tons of lithium.
"It could change the dynamics of lithium globally..." Struck Gold In the race to hoard lithium, a metal crucial for creating the batteries that power electric vehicles, the US may have fortuitously stumbled on the world's biggest deposit yet. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, estimates that the McDermitt Caldera, a volcanic crater on the Nevada-Oregon border, harbors a colossal 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium. Based on these newest figures, the caldera dwarfs the amount of lithium in even Bolivia's salt flats, home to around 23 million tons. "If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium," Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University who was not involved in the study, told Chemistry World. "It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics." Here to Clay Some of the world's richest lithium stores are contained in brine. But the…