Inclusions

The project objective is to determine the processes responsible for critical element enrichment in carbonatites and to enhance our ability to identify and assess economic deposits. This project will work at various scales to meet this objective and will primarily focus on deposits within the US or our Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative collaborative Nations Canada and Australia.

Critical elements are essential to the modern economy and have potential supply chain disruptions, but compared to most base and precious metals, little work has been done in understanding ore-grade enrichments. Carbonatites are the primary source of the worlds light rare earth elements and niobium, and a potential source for heavy rare earths, scandium, tantalum, and thorium. Project objectives...

This project supports the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (EarthMRI) by developing a mineral systems approach for defining focus areas. This project is investigating domestic sources of critical minerals in three sequential stages: inventory, research, and assessment. 1) Inventory the abundance of critical minerals in ore, minerals, and processed materials from major deposits in each system...

This project applies innovative melt inclusion and mineralogical techniques to characterize several distinctive magma types occurring together with prodigious, critical rare earth elements (REE) and gold-(antimony-tellurium) ore deposits within the U.S. We will characterize the pre-eruptive/pre-emplacement magmatic conditions in several districts. The goal is to determine the role of magmatism in...

The project aims to improve our understanding of the causes of tellurium enrichment in epithermal precious metal deposits, and strengthen our ability to assess the Nation's tellurium deposits. Tellurium is used in solar panel technologies and is considered a critical mineral. Epithermal deposits of this type represent a prospective future source of tellurium.