…“We do know that warm ocean waters make hurricanes more destructive and the Gulf of Mexico is currently an exceptional 2 degrees above its average temperature.

The loss of life and the destruction of communities are incomparable losses for those directly affected, but the implications of Helene’s destruction in our interconnected world are broader than the US context…

…“As we know, capitalism today rests upon an immensely complex set of structures and processes that turn human labour and raw materials into a vast wealth of material production.

One of the most complex, and arguably the most complex thing ever constructed by humans, is the global semiconductor supply chain, turning sand, through some of the most sophisticated engineering and chemical processes ever devised, into the silicon chips that are now completely ubiquitous in our electronic devices…

…“But because this vast system is so complex, it is also vulnerable.

We have covered before how a drought in Taiwan back in 2021, restricted production at a TMSC facility there, where 90% of the world’s most advanced silicon chips are made.

Or how, in the very same year, an exceptional cold snap held up production at a semiconductor fabrication plant in Texas.

Storm Helene is exposing another of those vulnerabilities, a critical pinch point in the entire global supply chain…

…“Spruce Pine is a tiny rural community deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and home to just over 2,000 people.

It is also the site of the purest quartz ever found on planet Earth. Once treated as a near worthless byproduct of mining, by the 1980s ultra pure quartz had become an *essential* ingredient in the production of silicon chips…

…“The deposit at Spruce Pine was formed close to 400 million years ago, from the grinding of tectonic plates that melted rock which then, deep underground, steadily cooked and crystallised into quartz. The exceptional purity of the deposits there comes from the unusual absence of water in their formation.

Only a few other ultra pure quartz mines operate on the planet. One in Norway, another at Chelyabinsk in Russia, and a third in Jiangsu in China…

…“But Spruce Pine has the purest product, which sells at about $10,000 a ton, and dominates production globally.

Silicon chips require silicon of exceptional purity, since any imperfection damages the tiny circuitry they contain. The wafers of silicon that are sliced and etched into individual chips can’t contain more than one atom of any other substance per billion silicon atoms…

…“The silicon has also to be formed into crystals with the precise molecular arrangement needed to make the silicon function seamlessly as a building block for electrical circuits.

So after the silicon has been obtained from sand and chemically purified, it is melted and extruded into the wafers that have this internal crystalline structure. This melting and extrusion has to happen at very high temperature in a crucible that itself has no impurities…

…“Only quartz can withstand those high temperatures and only quartz specifically mined at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is pure enough to be used as a crucible for the silicon.

Meanwhile, the other use for exceptionally pure silicon is in producing photovoltaic solar panels. The extraordinary expansion of solar energy in the last few years depended *critically* on the supply of high quality quartz to the solar industry…

…“particularly in China, which last year installed more solar panels than the rest of the world combined.

Because it is so pure, quartz mined at Spruce Pine is a dazzling crystalline white. In large quantities, and even when it is lower grade, it resembles the whitest of white beach sands. And that means it has one other use too. It is much sought after by golf courses the world over to build aesthetically appealing golf bunkers…