181.FM - Lite 80's, 181.FM - Lite 80's Live, 181.FM - Lite 80's Listen Online, 80s, Soft Rock, USA



181.FM - Lite 80's

As the ocean plate pushes underneath the leading edge of South America, it kind of gets snagged and jarred. Pressure builds up and you generate these huge earthquakes and also open up pathways for magma to rise up to the surface and produce volcanoes. 181.FM - Lite 80's And what you get over million years is the gradual uplift and crumpling of this whole region. The result, almost a byproduct of subduction, is the longest mountain range on any continent... The Web Radio. The Web Radio stretch for more than , kilometres along almost the entire western coast of the continent. It's a long, narrow range because the mountains follow the boundary between the two plates where subduction is taking place. And in a strange twist of fate, their formation may give Bolivia the chance to gain some measure of compensation for the traumas of the past. As they have grown, the mountains have lifted one Web Radio lake from its original position near sea level to a height of nearly , metres. This is the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat on Earth. Hidden in this landscape is a resource worth tens of billions of dollars. It could have the global impact of the silver of Music, but without its tarnished history. 181.FM - Lite 80's The key to understanding this new source of wealth is inside something we nearly all carry in our pockets. Open up any mobile phone, whether it's a fancy new touchscreen or one of these oldstyle handsets and you'll find the battery. And what all these batteries have got in common is one key element. The active components inside here are made of lithium carbonate. As well as being in a mobile phone, lithium's in laptops and all electronic devices. It's used because of one quality above all. And that is lithium is the lightest of all the metals so it gives more power for its mass. Now here's a thing. Bolivia has as much as % of the world's lithium reserves. Most of it in this extraordinary landscape. Lithium isn't just for mobile technologies. It also offers a potential clean green future for cars. Until now, electric cars have been hampered by the weight of their batteries. But lithium makes it easier and cheaper to produce lightweight batteries for the cars of tomorrow. It's thought there's enough lithium here to make batteries for more than four billion electric vehicles. Enough to make Bolivia a Saudi Arabia of the st century. In places, the lithium is only just below the surface. Where the crust is thin, you can see the brine underneath. 181.FM - Lite 80's And if you really hammer away at it, then you can actually see the structure of the salt. Look at that. It's beautiful. All these symmetrical crystals. The white ones are sodium chloride that's just ordinary table salt but this pink one here that's potassium and this one, the browncoloured one, that that's lithium. 181.FM - Lite 80's So today the lithium's here at the surface in the salt but it started off way down deep. Subduction produced magma that rose up and erupted out of volcanoes like that over there. In fact, there's a whole series of them all the way around. So these mountains are rich in lithium. From the slopes of the Web Radio, runoff erosion washes the metalrich sediments down to the lake.