I have heard a claim that, if civilization collapses at this point, it won’t be possible for us to get back to this level of technology again, because all of the easily mined metals we need for incremental increases in technology have already been mined. Is this true? Is it harder to re-use the surface metals from products we have already made, than it is to get ore from caves?
If anything it would be easier, since there will be huge piles of pre-smelted steel, copper & aluminum just lying about on the surface. No need to mine anything.
The lack of easily available coal & oil might be a problem, though.
Previous thread on the topic: Metal after the Apocalypse
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The easily mined stuff has been barely touched. The cheaply mined stuff is being seriously mined. The two are not the same.
E.g., the Norse were good at getting iron ore from nodules in bogs. “Bog iron”. Easy enough to acquire some to make an axe if you have old bogs around. Horribly uneconomic to do in the modern era.
Low grade iron and some other ores are quite common. But nobody mines them because it’s cheaper to get the stuff from high grade ores.
Aluminum companies own the mineral rights for large tracts of land in the US. But they mainly import the ore from overseas. (The plant I took a tour of as a kid got its from Jamaica. Despite there being deposits less than 100 miles away in the same state.) The offshore ore is better quality and the costs of mining there are lower. Shipping isn’t a big deal.
(OTOH, tin might be a problem if you want to start another bronze age.)
For iron, maybe (although getting stuff out of bogs isn’t really as easy as, say, just digging up iron sands, which are seriously mined.)
But for copper, tin, zinc, easy and cheap would be the same thing.
And after a civilisation collapse, mining aluminium isn’t going to be a concern - we’d need to be back close to our current level of tech to do it, since Al needs electricity to be refined on any scale.
Why does AL need electricity. It’s not like tungsten that it has a particularly high melting point.
In simplified terms, Aluminium oxidises so easily that you need to pump electrons into it to keep it in metal form. The problem isn’t the melting point. You can melt Aluminium in a camp fire.
The thing is, there’s already a lot of refined aluminum in the world. Refining aluminum from ore is energy-expensive which is why aluminum is the most recycled metal on the planet. Recycling aluminum takes something like 5% of the energy needed to refine it from ore. Once refined, it has a relatively low melting point. Post-TEOTWAWKI the survivors will have literal tons of accessible aluminum sitting around. A recovering civilization might have an Aluminum Age instead of a Bronze Age.
Mining landfills. Indeed.
I said refined, not melted. Melting Al is no problem. Getting the buggers away from their oxygens, is.
Not nearly as useful, though - remember, bronze is harder than iron. Despite a common misconception, we didn’t move from bronze to iron because iron is harder or holds a better edge. Iron is just easier to get hold of. And of course, leads to steel which is harder and edgier. Aluminium has neither advantage.
The abundance of existing refined metals would end most mining efforts. Gold is still readily available in a labor intensive mining process, but requires no refining. Tin sources are extremely depleted but there is no shortage of refined aluminum which already replaces it in many applications. Copper is also abundant, as a practical metal the available material may get used up quickly and mining and refinement would resume, and likely using ancient labor intensive methods to separate the ore instead of chemical methods. Mercury would have limited use and the barrels of it stored because there’s nothing else to do with it will supply the world’s needs for a long time. Silver may get more notice as a precious metal and mining may resume. But the refinement of aluminum and iron would not be worth the effort, and by the time new material was needed the ability to refine it in quantity may be lost.
Sure, but there is an abundance of existing steel that would be used for most purposes, and tin is in short supply to make bronze from. Other forms of bronze might be used as technology develops, but just as in the past the availability of iron and steel, now already refined, would overshadow bronze.
I live about 100 yards from the Cliffs of Calvert in Maryland. In between the layers of clay that make up the cliffs, there are layers of iron ore. As the cliffs erode, it releases big chunks of iron ore onto the beach near my house. It is enough to make me wonder why the local Native Americans never developed any iron working skills. The stuff is literally all over the place. After TEOTWAWKI, I know a great place to easily mine low grade Iron Ore, and since the homes on the cliffs will be worthless, or gone, it shouldn’t be a problem mining it.
It takes a lot of heat to turn iron ore into iron. Had Native Americans developed copper technology they would have been closer to smelting iron. They’re pottery making largely used open kilns that wouldn’t have brought them closer either. In some past thread I asked about naturally occuring iron such as from meteors, turns out there’s very little of that, although used by Native Americans in the far north.
Aluminum has uses other than holding an edge. Cookware, for example. I could probably think of others as well. Iron - either scavenged/recycled or refined - for applications that need “hard” and “edge” and recycled aluminum for other applications, like cookware or various metal bits to hold things together or certain machine parts or something.
Did they have a strong pottery tradition? Without that, metal smelting is not going to get going. While it is possible to jump straight to iron rather than bronze (as happened in Africa) I don’t think this happened without a ceramic-heavy culture, as it seems likely smelting was derived from pottery first.
I don’t know the extent of Native American pottery craft, there were a number of cultures spread over two continents, but what I do know of was limited to open kilns, a circle of rocks, hot coals in the bottom, a piece of pottery on top, and perhaps more coals put inside of vessels. It’s not clear that the Native Americans used charcoal collected from other than open burns either, and without charcoal even more advanced closed kilns would not have led to smelting metals. It’s debatable whether even copper can be produced from just wood without turning it to charcoal first. There was some copper smelting in South America, but limited, and it’s unknown why the technology did not spread.
It keeps them Mobile.
(Sorry, that’s Alabaminium.)