/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53256000/jpg/_53256044_012113837-1.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="Mike deGruy with Marbled Rays off the Cocos Islands 2002"span style="width:304px;"The number of seabed mining applications is a growing focus for environmentalists' concern/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"Japanese researchers say they have discovered vast deposits of rare earth minerals, used in many high-tech appliances, in the seabed./p pThe geologists estimate that there are about a 100bn tons of the rare elements in the mud of the Pacific Ocean floor. /p pAt present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals. /p pAnalysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable./p pThe British journal Nature Geoscience reported that a team of scientists led by Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, found the minerals in sea mud at 78 locations./p p"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometre (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo. /p pThe minerals were found at depths of 3,500 to 6,000 metres (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface./ppOne-third of the sites yielded rich contents of rare earths and the metal yttrium, Mr Kato said./p pThe deposits are in international waters east and west of Hawaii, and east of Tahiti in French Polynesia. /p pMr Kato estimated that rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion tonnes./p pThe US Geological Survey has estimated that global reserves are just 110 million tonnes, found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States. /p pChina's apparent monopoly of rare earth production enabled it to restrain supply last year during a territorial dispute with Japan./p pJapan has since sought new sources of the rare earth minerals./p pThe Malaysian government is considering whether to allow the construction of an Australian-financed project to mine rare earths, in the face of local opposition focused on the fear of radioactive waste./p pThe number of firms seeking licences to dig through the Pacific Ocean floor is growing rapidly. /p pThe listed mining company Nautilus has the first licence to mine the floor of the Bismarck and Solomon oceans around Papua New Guinea. /p pIt will be recovering what is called seafloor massive sulphide, for its copper and gold content. /p pThe prospect of deep sea mining for precious metals - and the damage that could do to marine ecosystems - is worrying environmentalists. /ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eLHT6CIZbziUGEHTsoTILxaN0FU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eLHT6CIZbziUGEHTsoTILxaN0FU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eLHT6CIZbziUGEHTsoTILxaN0FU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eLHT6CIZbziUGEHTsoTILxaN0FU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/c4m3CWIRXoc" height="1" width="1"/