Some metals, like nickel and lithium, are household names; indeed, advertisements for batteries play on the exotic sound of "lithium-ion" as though it were a novelty, despite lithium's ubiquity in electric cars and gadgets. Yet the true drivers of the digital economy are the rare earth metals, without which modern electronic devices would not work. Once virtually unknown outside of geochemistry research, these metals, which include neodymium and praseodymium, as constituents of powerful magnets used in hard drives and computer speakers.
Rare earth elements are so named because they are uncommon on Earth; yet these metals, which comprise an entire row of the periodic table and then some, are clearly crucial to the modern economy. Unfortunately, the rarity of the rare earths extends beyond their dearth in the Earth's crust. Recently, they've become rarer in human supply chains, as evidenced by recent price spikes: the price of neodymium surged 75% between January 2020 to December 2020, and terbium doubled in price, according to a Physics Today report from 2021.
