MAINE PUBLIC • November 16, 2022
A team of federal, state and University of Maine geologists said it has found a rare deposit of potentially valuable minerals on part of Pennington Mountain in Aroostook County. These elements are on a list of several dozen critical minerals that federal officials consider important for manufacturing electronics and defense systems. Amber Whittaker, a senior geologist with the Maine Geological Survey, said this is a collection of critical minerals that aren’t usually found in such large amounts in any one place. "Getting a minable concentration of them are rare," she said. "We want them to minable because we use them in so many high-tech consumer products, like cellphones, computer hard drives, electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles."