176 Miracles Ahead! 



"In land mines," explained John J. O'Neill in the New 

 York Herald Tribune, "the desired elements usually are locked 

 in rocky matrices of silica and other undesired substances. 

 It is usually necessary to grind the ore to a powder for proc- 

 esses in which the desired metals are separated. 



"When the ocean is used as a source of minerals it is neces- 

 sary to get rid of a large quantity of water. If only one of 

 the ocean salts is desired the handling of the great quantity 

 of water usually is a costly task. When it was sought to get 

 bromine from the ocean for use in anti-knock gasoline the 

 water was pumped through a series of tanks and towers on a 

 ship and a gas bubbled through the water. The gas combined 

 with the bromine and carried it away to be precipitated and 

 returned to the extraction tower." 



In 1934 the Dow Chemical Company began operating a 

 plant, on the coast of North Carolina, which used a simpler 

 process to get bromine from the ocean. Dow engineers esti- 

 mated that a chunk of ocean one mile square and eighty-nine 

 feet deep was pumped through the plant in twelve months. 



John J. O'Neill points out that in some places nature has 

 performed some of the work of extracting the excess water: 



"This takes place particularly in salt lakes. The Great Salt 

 Lake in Utah is such a body of water. The evaporation of 

 such lakes in the past has produced now-buried deposits of 

 all of the ocean salts. About 2,000 feet under Michigan is 

 buried a salt lake providing a vast supply of brine in which 

 magnesium and other salts are concentrated." 



The Dow Chemical Company has plants which use brines 

 from this Michigan salt lake to produce bromine, magnesium, 

 and other products. 



In 1940 the Dow Chemical Company constructed plants 

 on the coast of Texas to take magnesium and bromine from 

 the ocean. Magnesium salts are obtained from the water. 

 These are treated with hydrochloric acid to form magnesium 



