Lithium is a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and renewable energy storage systems, making it essential for the global energy transition. The ‘Lithium Triangle’ region, covering parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, hosts about 50 per cent of known global lithium resources in salty brines found in salt flats, or salars. Optimising this potential is crucial for meeting the growing demand for lithium.

However, issues exist around the potential effects of brine mining on sensitive habitats, groundwater and local and indigenous communities. Sustainable and responsible extraction is a key objective of the region: balancing environmental and social considerations against the urgent need for lithium is a complex challenge that requires collaborative approaches.

To help address this challenge, a BGS-led project is investigating the gaps in knowledge, data and capacity that may prevent the responsible production of lithium from the Lithium Triangle. Through collaboration, it will propose a prioritised research roadmap to help address gaps.  

Workshops in South America

In March 2024, in partnership with local institutions, BGS organised and attended workshops across the Lithium Triangle. The team started in Buenos Aires, Argentina, meeting with representatives from the national government, the geological survey and researchers from Argentina (CONICET). They then travelled to Salta in the north for workshops with operators and the provincial governments of Salta, Jujuy and Catarmarca.

The team then moved on to Chile, starting in Santiago for workshops with researchers, the geological survey, policymakers and operators. The next workshop was held in Copiapo, in the north of Chile, hosted by the University of Atacama with researchers, local government and indigenous community representatives attending.

The workshops provided participatory space for an open dialogue between different stakeholders. The exchange of views and participants’ experience and insights will aid the development of the research roadmap.

Further work

The team is now working on the outcomes and findings from the workshops. A draft of the final report will be shared openly for feedback and input from workshop participants and interested stakeholders. The aim is for the report and roadmap to be used to identify potential research projects, as well as collaboration opportunities and support applications for funding. All this will aid the responsible scale-up of lithium production from salars in South America.

Thanks

We would like to thank all the participants at the workshops and meetings for their valuable time and engagement. We would also like to thank the British embassies in Argentina and Chile and Simon Chater, who is head of science and innovation at the , for all their help.

Funding

The project is funded through the UK Science Innovation Network of the and . Funding was also received from the Chilean embassy.

51ÁÔÆæ research team

• Jon Ford
• Rowan Halkes
• Andrew Hughes
• Evi Petavratzi

About the author

Rowan Halkes

The new United Nations (UN) International Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management (ICE-SRM) focus on supporting sustainable management of the resources needed for development, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

As part of this initiative, BGS and five other partners will help to provide policy support, technical advice, education, training and other critical activities for stakeholders involved in the sustainable development of primary raw materials.

Each centre, within its activity footprint, will identify opportunities and navigate barriers to adopt the UN Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC) and the UN Resource Management System (UNRMS), as well as showcasing best practices and sharing results within the ICE-SRM network. This will be achieved by developing the scientific and socio-economic understanding for both production and reducing the use of primary raw materials, as well as designing and implementing the products, processes, policies and systems required for the transition to a circular economy.

The activities and projects of an ICE-SRM will include:

• capacity building, to ensure other relevant organisations have the skills required to implement sustainable resource management practises through UNFC and UNRMS
• contribution to further development and maintenance of UNFC and UNRMS
• advocacy for the adoption of sustainable resource management practices
• outreach via workshops, training and promotion of outputs to share best practice

This is an exciting opportunity to showcase BGS excellent research into the responsible use of mineral resources. By collaborating with experts from academia and the UN, this centre can translate scientific excellence into tangible policy goals for more sustainable use of raw materials.

Tom Bide, BGS Minerals Geoscientist.

, with agricultural land use occupying the vast majority of that space. . Soils enable food production and livestock grazing, in addition to other essential ecosystem services such as carbon or water storage.  

Soil parent materials are one of five soil-forming factors and are derived from the weathering of underlying rocks and deposits. Understanding a soil parent material is useful when assessing different types of environmental and soil measurements as it strongly influences a soil texture, drainage characteristics, baseline chemistry and depth and profile structure. 

What is the BGS Soil Parent Material Model? 

The 51ÁÔÆæ Soil Parent Material Model provides information to better understand soil and subsoil characteristics across Great Britain. It includes information on:  

• textureÌý
• depthÌý
• chemistryÌý
• erosionÌýÌý

The dataset is intended for a wide range of users, including: 

• farmers 
• agronomists 
• environmental groups 
• land agents 
• energy companies  

The model provides information to help farmers and agronomists to identify soils and landscapes susceptible to erosion and develop more resilient soil-management plans for their farms. Increasingly, the dataset is being combined with on-farm soil sample data, as well as being used to cross-check data captured from drone surveys and onboard sensors.  

Soil texture  

The texture of a soil is a critical factor for crop production and other types of land use. It is one of the most easily recognisable soil properties for farmers when assessing their soils for crop viability. Texture is determined by the size and mixture of clay, sand and silt particles, which influence a wide range of other soil properties like its water-holding capacity, drainage characteristics and overall structure.  

For example, soils with a heavy clay content better retain water and nutrients; however, their compact structure makes them harder to work with. Sandy soils allow for better drainage due to the larger particles, but this can make them more susceptible to drying out in warmer conditions and allow nutrients to leach away much more easily during heavy rainfall. Loamy soils, which contain a more equal distribution of sand, silt and clay, are often considered to be the most ideal soil type for agriculture.  

The BGS Soil Parent Material Model dataset indicates soil texture using the descriptions ‘light’, ‘medium’ and ‘heavy’, based on the percentage sand, silt and clay content. 

Soil depth  

The depth of a soil influences the type of vegetation that can grow in it, as well as how much water and nutrients may be available. Deep-rooted crops will require deeper soils to thrive and there may be problems with water management where shallow soils are unable to provide sufficient plant-available water capacity.  

Interest in putting more organic carbon back into soils is increasing, which is also driving more interest in the thickness of soil profiles across Great Britain. These profiles are available in the BGS Soil Parent Material Model. The dataset has also been used to look at agroforestry, where soil depth plays an important role in crop development. 

Soil chemistry  

A soil chemistry is heavily derived from the minerals found in the underlying soil parent material. Applications of nutrients and conditioners to farming land can change this over time, but the natural processes of soil development will always return a soil to the baseline geochemistry of its parent.  

The pH of a soil is critical to nutrient availability, influencing the type of vegetation that can grow in it. Our dataset provides information on the carbonate content of parent materials, which has been used to assess buffering of pH, as well as the plant availability of critical minerals like magnesium and selenium. 

Soil erosion 

One of the threats to soils is the risk of erosion by wind and rain, which has been blamed on intensive agriculture and land-management processes. . Climate change may exacerbate soil erosion. Changing weather patterns can bring periods of more intense rainfall, creating rills and gullies in a wide range of soil types, whilst periods of desiccation during heatwaves, combined with more intense wind systems, pose a risk of wind erosion to our lighter soils. The loss of valuable soils into drainage systems is costly and often requires some form of remedial clean-up.  

Why are more people accessing BGS Soil Parent Material Model? 

Increasing interest in the BGS Soil Parent Material Model can be attributed to a growing awareness of the importance of soils and the need to better understand soils to help develop sustainable agriculture. The UK Government ‘‘ outlines the aim for all of England soils to be managed sustainably by 2030. 

UK research into soils has grown significantly in the last few years and, more recently, has been driven by better modelling techniques and data availability, and a rise in people wanting to use data for soil and landscape metrics. Farmers are also being asked to collect more information about their soils. This valuable new data can be used in conjunction with mapping to improve sampling strategy and optimise the extrapolation of the data across the wider farm holdings. The wider agronomy sector is using a range of novel spatial analysis techniques, including artificial intelligence, to compare different aspects of land use for soil benchmarking; integration with the parent material mapping enables local-to-regional extrapolation of their research. 

How to access the model 

The 51ÁÔÆæ Soil Parent Material Model dataset is available for download. A more detailed, 1:50 000-scale dataset is available under licence — please contact BGS Enquiries (enquiries@bgs.ac.uk). The dataset webpages have more information, links, sample data, downloads and a user guide. 

The model is also available to view as a map through the (UKSO), which provides soil data comprising 200 layers of information from nine research bodies across the UK. 

The future of the BGS Soil Parent Material Model 

We are currently in the process of securing funding for UKSO the next five years and preparing for the latest release of the BGS Soil Parent Material Map within the next 12 months.  

51ÁÔÆæ has an active soil research team and a world-leading group of environmental statisticians contributing to our soil research activities.   

For further information about the BGS Soil Parent Material Model please contact the digital data team (digitaldata@bgs.ac.uk).  

About the authors

Lauren Harris is a business assistant in BGS Informatics, but is also in her fourth year of part-time study at the Open University studying for a BSc in environmental science (2020 to present).

Gravel-dominated beach and barrier systems are common around the UK and provide important coastal defences, especially in low-lying regions. ÌýA new, four-year research project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and entitled ‘Gravel barrier coasts’ (GBCoasts), will deliver enhanced understanding and modelling of gravel barrier systems. The project aims to support more sustainable coastal management by increasing resilience and reducing the vulnerability of coasts to climate change.

51ÁÔÆæ will use a new community modelling system, ‘Coastal modelling environment (CoastalME)’, alongside terrestrial, marine and groundwater models, to characterise how a combination of processes along gravel barrier coasts control coastal flooding and erosion.

CoastalME will produce numerical simulations to support multi-hazard analyses under present and future climate change scenarios. These will project, over a range of timescales:

• how multi-hazards will respond to predicted climate change processes and impacts
• how humans are affecting future hazards
• how we will be affected under different coastal management scenarios; for example, how do gravel barriers respond to individual events, such as storms, in the context of longer-term, ‘progressive’ trends, such as sea-level rise?

The results will support improved coastal management decision making based on the improved understanding of how gravel barriers evolve over longer time scales under different climate condition and human intervention scenarios.

The findings will be combined with an assessment of the role of coastal habitats, resulting in national maps of vulnerabilities of coastal habitats to climate-driven multi-hazards for protective services. BGS will also provide tools to analyse the efficacy of future coastal management schemes.

The GBCoasts project will enable us to better address the transformational challenges that many communities along the UK coastlines are facing today and in the near future, regarding ever-increasing risks of coastal flooding and coastal erosion.

Andres Payo Garcia, BGS Coastal Geomorphologist.

In order to achieve the objectives of GBCoasts, there will be a collaboration between the different sectors of UK academics, engineering consultants and research institutions.

The World Landslide Forum takes place every three years, with the first meeting held in Tokyo, Japan, in 2008, and sees the participation of over a thousand researchers from all over the world. The aim of the forum is to create a common platform to promote cooperation between scientists, technicians and experts to develop collaborative strategies to reduce the risk of landslides worldwide.

The sixth World Landslide Forum, which was titled ‘Landslide science for sustainable development’, took place this year in Florence, Italy, from Tuesday 14 to Friday 17 November 2023.

It was announced at the forum that BGS has been designated as a World Centre of Excellence on landslide risk reduction, along with 15 other institutes.

It was a great honour for BGS to receive this recognition, which is testament to the hard work and excellent science undertaken by our landslides team.

Prof Jonathan Chambers, BGS Head of Shallow Geohazards and Earth Observation.

During the forum, the most important aspects relating to landslide research were addressed, following six thematic areas:

• monitoring and early warning
• modelling
• hazard and risk assessment
• mitigation techniques
• triggering mechanisms
• climate change

Soil erosion processes present the greatest risk to land degradation worldwide and, due to fertile soil being an essential resource, there is increasing concern around the world regarding accelerated soil erosion, particularly in developing countries.

The analysis of plutonium (Pu) in soil samples can inform the understanding of soil erosion processes globally. However, there are specific challenges associated with such analysis in tropical soils, so an optimal analytical methodology that ensures the best sensitivity is critical.

Why use plutonium?

Due to their long retention times and minimal spatial variability, Pu isotopes have proven useful as an alternative fallout radionuclide tracer for determining soil erosion rates. To utilise Pu as an effective soil erosion tracer in the southern hemisphere, separation techniques and analyses need to be optimised to establish a robust analytical method for the determination of ultra-trace level Pu isotopes. This method must also have sufficient sensitivity for African soil samples, which typically have very low Pu concentrations compared to the northern hemisphere.

This research aimed to accurately establish fallout Pu activity concentrations in tropical soils in order to determine soil erosion rates with an improved separation and analysis method for ultra-trace Pu determination. To achieve this aim we had to:

• adapt and optimise a separation method using trialkyl methylammonium nitrate (TEVA) cartridges to remove matrix interferences with pre-concentration of ultra-trace Pu isotopes (this reduced waste and increased throughput)
• establish a robust analytical method for the determination of ultra-trace level Pu isotopes with sufficient sensitivity for African soil samples using oxygen as a reaction gas for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)

The development of robust analytical methods to determine rates of soil erosion and its effect on land degradation is vital to advise mitigation strategies, ultimately ensuring the future sustainability of soils.

Sophia Dowell, PhD student at BGS.

Where does the plutonium come from?

Pu is present in the environment primarily because of nuclear weapons testing. Between 1945 and 1980, 520 atmospheric tests were conducted worldwide; however, only 10 per cent of these experiments were conducted in the southern hemisphere. This resulted in significantly less fallout in the tropics than in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, which makes the analysis of ultra-trace Pu isotopes in tropical soils challenging.

The challenge of plutonium analysis

Due to their long retention time and minimal spatial variability, Pu isotopes have recently been used as an alternative fallout radionuclide tracer for determining soil erosion rates. As a result of the long half-lives of ²³⁹Pu and ²⁴⁰Pu (24 110 and 6561 years, respectively), approximately 99 per cent of the original activity remains in soils. This means they are suitable as stable, long-term tracers compared to, for example, 137 caesium (Cs), despite Cs’s significantly higher activity in the environment, as Cs only has a half-life of 30 years. Additionally, more than six times as many atoms of ²³⁹Pu and ²⁴⁰Pu were initially dispersed compared to ¹³⁷Cs. This combination of long half-life and higher atom content makes mass spectrometry (MS) techniques better suited to Pu isotopes, whereas radiometric decay counting techniques are more appropriate for the higher specific activity ¹³⁷Cs.

Consequently, recent developments in mass spectrometry techniques have the potential to increase the sensitivity of Pu isotope quantification and subsequently the availability of analytical methods applicable to tropical soils. This raises the potential of using Pu as a soil erosion tracer in the tropics, where the risk of soil degradation is increasing due to extreme weather patterns.

A powerful tool

This method presents a simple, cost-effective, robust sequence with reduced laboratory waste disposal, which is vital to ensure the separation method is applicable to low-resource laboratories. Along with the low detection limits that are comparable to alternative MS methods, this outcome makes the method applicable to the detection of ultra-trace fallout Pu in African soils.

Due to increasing concern regarding accelerated soil erosion and its impact on sustainable intensification of agriculture in developing countries, this work provides advancements in the detection of Pu. The new method is also a powerful tool for the analysis of ultra-trace Pu in African soils, ultimately improving the determination of soil erosion rates in tropical soils to better inform mitigation strategies.

This method has the potential to improve access to advanced soil erosion measurements that could be produced faster than traditional laboratory techniques to enable analyses at scale, yet with greater accuracy than machine learning predictions based on remote sensing data in developing countries which are most at risk to land degradation.

Sophia Dowell, PhD student at BGS.

Funding

51ÁÔÆæ led the research in conjunction with the University of Plymouth and the University of Eldoret in Kenya.

Sophia PhD was supported by the NERC funded ARIES doctoral training programme (grant number NE/S007334/1), and from the NERC International National Capability grants to BGS (NE/R000069/1 and NE/X006255/1), Royal Society International Collaboration grant (ICA/R1/191077), British Academy (WW21100104) and BGS University Funding Initiative (GA/19S/017).

More information

The full research paper is available: .

51ÁÔÆæ has forged a partnership with Ossian — which will be one of the world largest floating wind farms on completion — to share valuable data that will support BGS work to understand earth and environmental processes.

The agreement means that BGS will be provided with information Ossian geophysical surveys, which will examine the seabed around its 858 km² site. Once completely covered by ice, the site is now around 72 m below sea level and is situated 84 km off the east coast of Scotland.

The data will allow scientists to understand more about the seabed composition and subsurface structure, and how these have changed over time due to environmental changes and challenges. The partnership will provide BGS with data that will advance its knowledge and understanding of the rock and soil units under the seabed and update its baseline data for the region and benefit the offshore industry as a whole.

At BGS, we rely heavily on these sorts of collaborations to update our understanding of regional stratigraphy across sites, which can then be fed into publicly available datasets, reports and papers for all users of the seabed (and subsurface) to access in the future.

Data and scientific collaborations are essential for updating state-of-the-art knowledge and understanding of ground conditions for all to use in relation to future developments. This is a truly fantastic collaboration between BGS and Ossian Wind Farm, and BGS is very grateful to the joint venture for seeing the potential in this project.

Gareth Carter, BGS Marine Geoscientist.

51ÁÔÆæ has worked with Ossian joint venture partner SSE Renewables on data sharing initiatives for more than a decade. 

About the author