CNBC: Huge Rare Earth Deposits Found in Pacific

I saw this headline this morning and thought to myself, "do I need to dump my rare earths investment?"

I haven't blogged about this one before, but in my speculation portfolio I have a position in a company called UCore Rare Metals. They possess land in Alaska that contains huge deposits of heavy rare earths. These are critical materials in the production of consumer electronics and defense technologies, so their availability is of great economic and national importance. This is becoming more so the case because, as the CNBC article notes, China, where much of the present global supply of rare earths comes from, has been increasingly restricting exports of these materials.

I picked up my speculative position in UCore based on the simple economic principal that scarcity increases prices. Then along comes this discovery, that there are many, many times the deposits of rare earths relative to land-based deposits, in easily extractable form, in ocean mud. Does this mean that scarcity will now go out the window? If so, I may need to abandon this play and move on.