How do we Mine Minerals?: Crash Course Geology #22
Channel: CrashCourse
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Duration: PT622S
Read a transcript preview of “How do we Mine Minerals?: Crash Course Geology 22” from CrashCourse, uploaded on 2026-10-22.
Transcript preview
Language: American English (original, creator captions)
[0:00] No matter where you are, or what device you’re watching this on— it’s because of minerals.
[0:04] Subterranean specks from all over the world power our lives in invisible ways.
[0:08] They’re in our buildings, our tech, our food packaging, and our toothpaste.
[0:12] Without them, there’d be no solar batteries, no wind turbines, no electric cars.
[0:16] Today, our modern society depends on a wider variety of minerals,
[0:19] at a larger scale, than ever before.
[0:22] But… what does that mean for our future?
[0:26] Hi! I’m Sage, and this is Crash Course Geology.
[0:28] [THEME MUSIC]
[0:33] Earlier in this series, we learned the basics of minerals:
[0:36] solid crystals with specific chemical compositions, formed by geological processes.
[0:41] We humans have been innovating with them for thousands of years,
[0:44] all the way back to painting on cave walls with hematite,
[0:47] and later making tools out of bronze and iron.
[0:50] And today, minerals are behind nearly every gadget and gizmo in our tech-fueled world.
[0:55] Take your phone, for example.
[0:56] There are about 42 different minerals in the average smartphone alone!
[1:00] Quartz sand and sphalerite are used to make its screen, and bauxite helps it light up.
[1:04] There’s silicon from quartz in its circuits, wolframite and bastnaesite to make it vibrate,
[1:09] lithium in its batteries, sourced from spodumene… I could go on.
[1:13] But how do we get all those minerals that our societies are literally built on?
[1:18] Well, it’s complicated.
[1:19] Mining, or the extraction of minerals from the earth, can be done in four main ways.
[1:25] Some mining happens underground,