Strengthening the Critical Raw Material Independence of the EU through thermochronology

The rapidly increasing green technology transition efforts of the European Union to combat climate change resulted in an unprecedented demand for critical raw materials like rare earth elements, cobalt, nickel and even base metals. These materials are core components of wind turbines and electric cars.

However, to fulfil these needs, the EU heavily relies on countries with a high risk of supply chain disruption due to political instability.

Therefore, the exploration efforts to find new deposits within the EU borders are crucial to securing economic independence and realising a CO2-free society. The Swedish part of the Fennoscandian Shield has serious potential to discover new deposits. For instance, it hosts the largest rare earth element reserve in the EU.

The areal extension of the Fennoscandian Shield is over 1 million km2 and composed of complex magmatic, metamorphic and metasedimentary rocks dating back to Archean. Over time, due to multiple orogenic events, critical raw material deposits formed and re-mobilized in diverse ways. Understanding the formation mechanisms is crucial to locating them.

My project, “CRITTER: Strengthening the Critical Raw Material Independence of the EU through thermochronology"" will be the first study to reconstruct the thermal history of the Fennoscandian Shield from a critical raw material perspective.

It will be achieved by the interdisciplinary combination of novel high-temperature mica in-situ Rb-Sr dating at the Dept. of Earth Sciences, Gothenburg and by low-temperature zircon, rutile in-situ U-Pb-He double dating at the Geoscience Center, Göttingen. These are world-class laboratories in their respective field.

The research will target five key critical raw material deposits in the Bergslagen ore province of southwestern Sweden.

The findings will fill a decisive knowledge gap in identifying the nature and timeline of ""re-heating"" and subsequent ore re-mobilization and re-deposition events from Proterozoic to Present times.