by Jaime Lowe
The beginning of lithium is the beginning of everything. Imagine when the universe wasn’t even one second old, nearly fourteen billion years ago. There was no space, just a very dense, single point in the universe. There wasn’t really even a universe in the traditional sense of the word. It was about ten trillion degrees and made up of neutrons and protons. It was so scalding hot that those neutrons and protons couldn’t stick to each other—they just careened around like restless teenagers, slamming into each other. Within the first three seconds of the formation of the universe, the elements present—overwhelmingly helium and hydrogen—exploded into a raging storm of superheated energy. It was violent, tumultuous, restless, hot, and raw. Lithium was there in such small quantities that only one part lithium matched one billion hydrogen atoms—its presence almost seemed mythical, nearly invisible, but not quite. After two minutes, the universe existed and it was made up of hydrogen, helium, lithium, deuterium, and tritium and that was all for billions of years. For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the intense heat from the universe’s creation made it essentially too hot for light to shine. There was a period of darkness before stars and other bright objects were formed. What is a world without light, without shadows and stars and a scale of grays? What was this darkness? What was this universe? What existed before time and space? What was this manic burst of energy followed by deep, sedentary darkness? These were questions that a manic person is not really allowed to ask because the origin story of earth, of the universe, of the world, seems kind of far out.
Galaxies and stars were formed. The other naturally occurring elements came later. Many scientists think the sun and the rest of our solar system came from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As gravity caused the nebula to collapse, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. As the universe expanded, it cooled. At one stage, the temperature of the growing universe was similar to temperatures in the cores of stars like our sun. According to a 2009 article in the New Scientist, “The existing amounts of hydrogen and helium match theory perfectly—so well, in fact, that cosmologists claim this is the best evidence we have for the big bang. Things aren’t so good for the third element, lithium, however. When we count up the lithium atoms held in stars, there is only one-third as much of the lithium-7 isotope as there should be.” There have been recent theories that lithium is made during some supernova explosions; it’s also one of the few elements produced in interstellar space by high-energy cosmic rays. But unlike most other elements, lithium is destroyed by its stars. This depletion is known as “The Lithium Problem,” one of the few aspects of the Big Bang theory that doesn’t make sense. The amount of lithium, or lack thereof, just doesn’t add up.
In 2005, Neil deGrasse Tyson, ambassador to all things astrophysics, wrote: “Lithium remained a rather rare element, distinguished among astrophysicists by the cosmic fact that stars hardly ever make more lithium, but only destroy it. Lithium rides down a one-way street because every star has more effective nuclear fusion reactions to destroy lithium than create it. As a result, the cosmic supply of lithium has steadily decreased and continues to do so. If you want some, now would be a good time to acquire it.” One of the theories surrounding the Big Bang is that there should be three times as much lithium as can be observed. I asked Tyson whether this lithium destruction was still in effect and he wrote me, “The circumstances surrounding lithium, as detailed in that quote, remain unchanged. What the quote does not address is that Big Bang nucleosynthesis, a cottage industry among cosmologists, predicts three to four times as much lithium as is observed in stars that should have nicely preserved that lithium abundance from the beginning. This is called the Lithium Problem and, last I checked, it’s still not resolved.” The Lithium Problem, an unsolved galactic mystery of universal origins! Astrophysicists debate where lithium is most present—some have said stars rich in lithium can host alien life; our own sun lacks lithium as do most stars that host planets; others have said they found brown dwarfs to be lithium-rich; lithium lives in asteroids and dying planets. It is everywhere in space, on earth, in me, on me.
I have these galactic leggings from the Fulton Street Mall, tight spandex holding in my body. My lithium body. The leggings make me think of the microcosmic universe of the cells that make up our bodies and of the celestial macrocosm mirrored in the night sky. I had too little lithium, too much lithium. I had a lithium problem too. I imagined wearing my leggings and being weightless in space, tethered to nothing, floating free among Hubble images—near enough to the explosions of dreamlike rainbow clouds to feel them, to taste them, to absorb them in my haze. I’m not afraid among the stars because I can feel a permeation, a subtle intake of lithium’s fairy dust floating with me like an invisible shield, what it has always been. My medication is stardust.
The beginning of lithium is the beginning of time, the darkest lightest moments of our universe. With that astrophysics primer, I wanted to travel to one of the grandest, most delusional places of all, the world’s largest reserve of lithium. I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the wellspring of my sanity, in Bolivia.
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HER BODY HIT the mat like a stunning shock of weight, her purple petticoats blooming like a bouquet; her opponent, wearing red, grabbing her by the waist dragging her across the ring with the kind of showmanship that was definitive—she would make mincemeat of the woman she loathed, this purple petticoat monster lady. She pulled her foot, pranced about, making faces, and threw the purple lady’s tiny top hat into the audience; she mocked the lesser of the two as if she was dragging out the punishment; she enjoyed it, the choke holds, the slamming, the shaming, the predictability of it all. And as if rising from the dead, the meeker of the two—the Cholita in purple—gathered her petticoats and her strength and fought back, clawing away for comic justice. Popcorn flew into the audience, water splashed, limbs split and splayed. The Flying Cholitas, a group of female wrestlers who perform in the same vein as Lucha Libre wrestling, crashed into each other and audience members in the tented gym. The gym was one death-defying winding bus ride from a hostel in the La Paz city center. The Cholitas performed in El Alto, meaning “the high” or “the heights,” the mostly Aymaran town that was hastily built into cliffs as high as thirteen thousand feet above sea level. The city looked down on La Paz; they were connected by a red line funicular. The Cholitas wore traditional Bolivian dress—intricate long braids, bowler hats, and multilayered skirts, colorful and stacked wide with ruffled rainbow skirts. The tiny top hats came into being after hat manufacturers in Manchester designed bowler hats for the British railway workers in Bolivia and made them accidentally too small. The hat designers convinced Bolivian women that little bowler hats were all the rage in Europe and the trend took off (just another example of how the white man took advantage of native culture). I looked at the Aymaran women wrestling and I thought Jamya could step into that ring.
How did I end up here, thinking deeply about mania and witnessing it in the form of awesomely psycho lady wrestlers? I had been in La Paz for a couple days, adjusting to the altitude before I could make my way to the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. These women, who had famously fought to gain financial control of their wrestling franchise, were a curious greeting. They clearly knew their audience—mostly tourists—but at the same time I couldn’t help wonder if life’s outward absurdity was a reminder that my inward absurdity wasn’t so weird. Here I was on a mission to see the largest quantity of my favorite medication, which now had the potential to kill me, sitting ringside next to visions that could have spilled from a hallucinatory mind. I was staying near the Witches’ Market and collected talismans and amulets that promised fertility, luck, and longevity. I stopped short of buying a dried llama fetus, used as a burial sacrifice to the fertility god Pachamama. I clambered up steep, cobbled alleys, out of breath, wondering: Was it the altitude or my kidneys or both? Pampered street dogs looked at me, judgmental of my
inability to adjust to the heights and the air. I panted, they panted. Would I always think my internal organs were at half function? It’s not helpful to imagine a persistent sickness, to be diagnosed with something that can always be blamed. It certainly doesn’t help an already obsessive, borderline hypochondriac mind. The thing was, when I watched the Cholitas, I did not feel weak. I did not feel powerless. I felt like a warrior, like them. I wanted to wear the tiny hat. I climbed through the city and found a street vendor on a corner that served chicharrón fresh from the fry. I took in the valley, the churches, the graffiti, the other foods that tasted less good, like a fast-food dish that looked like a meat Frisbee with a fried egg on top. After I adjusted to Bolivia’s altitude, I flew from La Paz to Uyuni, a nowhere zone of dust and Aussie bars and the promise of “real American breakfast.” The people who gather in Uyuni are there for one reason, to see the salt flats. Toyota Land Cruiser four-by-fours parked in front of the guide shops with jagged stickers that read Salt Life.
If there is an earthly environment that looks like the beginning of time, it is the salt flats of Bolivia. The vastness of Salar de Uyuni is intensified by its mind-bending, flesh-burning, breathtaking altitude. The salt flats spread out twelve thousand feet above sea level (a little lower than the height of the Cholita fights). The flats look like ice interrupted by ruptured crevices that form “crack polygons” from thermal contraction. This part of southern Bolivia consists of four thousand square miles of what were once prehistoric lakes, now dried up into crust and brine. Parts of the desert landscape have been used to test Mars rovers before missions. Gazing out at the horizon in Salar de Uyuni is like looking back into those earliest moments of the universe or maybe what a brown dwarf might look like six thousand light-years away. Aliens could hide at the optical illusion horizon, or behind the rusted-out abandoned railcars. In one direction, there is nothing to see but vast, glaring white; in another direction, psychedelically colored landscapes. The place feels like a hallucination. And this trek was equal parts soul tourism and complete manic realization. I was alone. H stayed behind out of respect for my spirit quest. I went with a group and was paired with a family of four who were trekking through South America for six months and homeschooling; the other four-by-fours were populated by a British couple, Australians, and a Finnish librarian who made enough money to work one year and travel one year, alternating at will. The drivers were Bolivian and well versed in lithium lore. The trek was about the flats, the dizzying, undeniably trippy flats. There was an island populated by century-old cactuses, a bloodred lagoon, flocks of hot-pink wild flamingos, a Bolivian guide who wore a surplus Shock and Awe army shirt, and piles of the blindingly white crystalline substance. Lithium salt piled everywhere, surrounding me, enveloping me. I stood on top of a small mountain and felt the lithium in my veins. I could hear the tiny vibrations sing back to me. I walked the crusted, jigsaw surface. I wanted to feel and taste its granularity and saltiness. The far-off Andean peaks floated dreamily, with no visible foundation. As I ran between the salt mounds, cracks accompanied each step. My hiking-boot footprints flooded with milky saltwater. I was so breathless, so thirsty, so thrilled. If ever there has been a perfect backdrop for a grandiose delusion, it is the Salar de Uyuni.
After a few days of off-roading, our group stopped at a camp and slept in a building made of salt bricks—a lithium igloo. We each had our own room and I huddled next to the wall, hoping to absorb some lithium. I wanted to lick it, to taste what I had swallowed without noticing. I sat in the nearby hot springs, in water naturally laden with high concentrations of lithium, and watched the steam rise on the moonshine horizon. If I soaked in this warm bath long enough, I thought, maybe it wouldn’t feel so bad to let go of my medicine—or maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe in a world like this, I wouldn’t need it. This was obviously a fleeting thought, but there I was soaking in the Altiplana trying to make sense of my body and this world. This world around me, which included a green blob plant named llareta that lived in this landscape too. It clung to desert mounds, kelly-green, and looked like alien moss except that its surface was hard and it had black sticky goo inside. The plant, our guide told us, was one of the oldest living things—some as old as three thousand years. Older than the sequoias and the Greek civilization that wrote of a lithium cure in the first place.
On my last day in Uyuni, the tourist town suffocated by sand and glaring sun and pockmarked with graffitied railcars and tall rusted-out artistically whimsical metal creatures, I thought about how the town was once a stopover for narcotraffickers hoping to move coca to Chile or Peru. Now trekkers wearing hiking boots and sunglasses and well-placed scarves walked through Uyuni largely unaware that the spectacular visions they came to see (a check off their South American bucket list) are also the future of Bolivia’s economic stability and possibly the world’s. I could see off in the distance the state-owned Bolivian lithium plant. None of the drivers knew much about it; they barely knew anyone who worked there. An estimated 50 percent of the world’s lithium supply lies beneath the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia. The increasing global demand for lithium has prompted many proclamations, including claims by Bolivians that the landlocked socialist country will become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” The danger of relying on any natural resource for national income is known as the “resource curse.” It seems like an almost too easy and obvious parallel to my dependence on lithium. Internationally, economists have been forecasting a lithium economy for decades, and it may well be that every car, computer, and wearable electronic device—not to mention our energy storehouses—will depend on lithium batteries the way I’ve relied on medicinal lithium for the last twenty years. If I were especially good at being bipolar (and entirely off my meds), I might invest all my money—and that of those I could convince to give me money—in lithium.
Whether Bolivians would benefit from their own resource is still an unknown. Their processing plant is starting to catch up with international competitors, but it’s not running at the same pace as mines in Chile, Western Australia, or even Nevada, which might be a good thing. Many indigenous people in the region that encompasses Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia have been exploited by firms flocking to the neighboring Atacama lands to mine “white gold”—but they rarely distribute the wealth of the operations equally or even fairly. “One lithium company, a joint Canadian-Chilean venture named Minera Exar, struck deals with six aboriginal communities for a new mine here. The operation is expected to generate about $250 million a year in sales, while each community will receive an annual payment—ranging from $9,000 to about $60,000—for extensive surface and water rights,” the Washington Post reported in 2016. Some companies see indigenous communities as small hurdles standing in the way of big profits. Bolivia’s lithium is more protected—after years of exploitation in silver mining, President Evo Morales is more cautious with their resources. Morales said in an interview that Bolivia’s lithium is “like a beautiful lady, very much sought and pursued.” Morales is determined to use the natural resource as an economic boost. National firms will get first crack at extracting the element, but if local companies can’t do it, then the state will allow private companies to invest—with the understanding that most of the profits would go to the Bolivian people.
A few years ago, a friend of mine published a book about lithium and batteries, and when it came out, I had a small panic attack—what if there wasn’t enough lithium for me and the batteries that power all of our electronic devices? Should I stockpile lithium, in case of emergency? I thought. It was a short-lived panic attack; I quickly learned that batteries don’t need much lithium and that it’s wildly abundant on earth already. But I also learned that the trick is in the extraction process. In fact, lithium and its various methods of extraction are considered the Wild West of speculation and mining right now. Trade magazines prophesize who will land the big contracts and who will really be able to provide the amount of lithium necessary to sustain the electric car
market, solar energy, and electronics.
Lithium plays a critical role in Elon Musk’s mass-produced Tesla fleet and his planned expansion of his solar power company, SolarCity. He’s banking on lithium to power both, and he’s not alone. Nearly 70 percent of the demand for the raw materials that make up new lithium-ion batteries will be coming from China. Prices for lithium carbonate were up 47 percent in the first quarter of 2016 from the average price in 2015. A Goldman Sachs report suggested that demand for lithium could triple within ten years to 570,000 tons a year. As Musk builds his billion-dollar gigafactory in northern Nevada, an industrial park next to the world’s biggest data center, the company would manufacture its own lithium-ion batteries. And where will the lithium be coming from? As part of the development deal, Tesla is constructing a new highway connecting the gigafactory to Silver Peak, Nevada, where the Silver Peak mine, now owned by conglomerate Albemarle, has been the only operational lithium mine in the United States.
If I thought the Salar de Uyuni was remote and desolate, I was wrong. Silver Peak, Nevada, has a population of about 350 people. It’s haunted and burnt by a sun-drenched landscape littered with a dusty collection of rusted-out car frames, employee trailers, and white barren hills. The one moving piece: a processing plant with endless pools in various stages of evaporation. The mine resides in Clayton Valley, a hot spot to at least a dozen different lithium prospectors hoping to tap into the “white gold” rush. The brine deposits that Silver Peak Mine has been extracting are part of a catchment area of approximately 540 square miles that includes at least five adjacent basins, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). They’re all hydrologically linked, which makes the area one of “the best-known deposits in the world” for lithium because of its expansiveness. This is because (like the climate in Bolivia) Silver Peak is arid; the basin is closed, tectonically active; and there’s an elevated heat flow from hot springs or young volcanoes. Hundreds of lithium junior mining companies are searching for lithium deposits in South America, Australia, and Nevada, too, and there are at least a dozen companies—with names like Lithium X, Nevada Sunrise Gold, and even “Elon Project,” named after Elon Musk—looking at Clayton Valley.