World's rarest metals or what's one billion per Troy ounce?

[Ardent Listener]

http://www.curiousnotions.com/home/metals.asp

To the left you see a logarithmic graph comparing the physical abundances, by weight in the earth’s crust, of what many would recognize to be the six most precious or “noble” metals. Ir, Au, Rh, Pd, Pt, and Ag stand for iridium, gold, rhodium, palladium, platinum, and silver respectively. These figures are at best educated guesses, but according to most sources iridium is the clear winner. It occurs at about four-tenths of a part per billion, a ratio similar to that of a grain of salt to a Clydesdale, making it about half again as rare as gold.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

Cool charts, AL! Thanks!

I got all excited last spring 'cause I thought I found traces of Platinum Group Metals in ore samples. Nope. Didn't test out. I would have quit my day job if it had.

[Corsair]

Not to be a nit-picker, but if something is "half as rare as gold," doesn't that mean it's twice as easy to find? Wouldn't you want to say that iridium is "twice as rare as gold"?

[avidbrandy]

Not to be a nit-picker, but if something is "half as rare as gold," doesn't that mean it's twice as easy to find? Wouldn't you want to say that iridium is "twice as rare as gold"?

making it about half again as rare as gold.

Not to be a nit-picker, but, aw whatever nevermind. Very interesting read though.

Wait so, palladium is more rare, but is worth less because not many uses?

[Rodebaugh]

Rare and recoverable.....two completely different things.....be careful with this article

my take:
Gold is lumped together in nice convenient deposits and is akin to picking up m&ms spilled upon the floor. Whereas Platinum, Palladium, and Rhodium are miniscule byproducts of nickel mining with the remainder spread out more like grains of sand upon the floor.

[RGJohn]

That is a very interesting and informative site. I never knew of naturally occuring plutonium before.
Nor did I realise that all iridium is ultimately of extraterrestrial origin.
Very good stuff.

[Ardent Listener]

I was surprised to learn that palladium was more rare (in the earth) than platinum. But platinum was more difficult to extract thus more rare in production.

[avidbrandy]

If what I'm looking at is accurate, Iridium closed at $780/toz on December 31st, 2010.
23 December 2011 it is at $1085/toz, a 39% increase YTD.


And then there's rhodium on the other hand, hitting $2500 in February of 2011, and now $1400 this week?

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

From what I have gathered, Platinum Group Metals (PGM's) have just as wild a ride as silver. When they are in demand, they skyrocket. When that demand is satisfied, they tumble. Still, that "tumble" price isn't bad.

It's kinda ironic to learn that the earliest Spanish Conquistadors found lots of PGM's at the mouths of rivers they paned for gold. They didn't know what is was. It wasn't gold, not silver.... so they threw it away!

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

I have a friend who showed me what he thought was a rock with a vein of silver in it. It's bright white, and shiny, but definitely not silver. The vein was bigger than a half inch in some places. He will not let me test it, nor tell me where he found it. *sigh*, too bad.

[BOHICA]

I thought you were going to say "Californium". The total world production is .275 grams and they once said it would cost $1,000,000,000 to make a single gram.