Deep Time and Powerful Magnets from Outer Space?

Some of those souvenirs with magnets attached that people put on filing cabinets, refrigerators, what have you...many magnets fade quickly and will not even hold up the plastic image. It just slides down. More powerful magnets exist, and sometimes we find them by accident when tinkering with things we took apart. Those may be rare earth magnets. Some are so powerful, their attraction to metal or each other can be a mite dangerous. Rare earth elements are, well, rare, because they are scattered and difficult to find.

Tetrataenite, Wikimedia Commons / Robert M. Lavinsky (CC BY-SA 3.0)

West Taiwan pretty much monopolizes the production of rare earth stuff, and people need those magnets for a variety of purposes. While looking for substitutes and ways to make alloys, it was discovered that an alloy called tetrataenite had properties that scientists wanted. But the main material is from meteorites. While finding meteorites and extracting the ore is unlikely to solve the problem, something interesting happened.

They presupposed deep time and that tetrataenite needed millions of years to form. How do they know that it took so long? When doing things the right way, this stuff formed in seconds. (Similar assumptions that gemstones took millions of years to form were overturned as well.) All of this gives biblical creationists cause to celebrate because deep-time assumptions were shown to be false.

Rare-earth magnets are essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines. They are also important in computer hard drives, cordless tools, microphones, loudspeakers, and hand-powered flashlights. But what is a ‘rare earth’? ‘Rare earth’ is the name of a group of metals called the lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium. . . .

However, the major problem with rare earths is their availability. Note, NOT rarity, despite the misnomer—samarium is more plentiful than tin, while neodymium is about five times more common—about as plentiful as cobalt, nickel, or copper. The problem is mining it: they are not in concentrated seams, so a lot of material must be mined to extract enough of the metal. So the mines are quite environmentally disruptive.

To read the entire article, see "Cosmic magnets vs long-age dogma."