21st Century Prospecting: AI-assisted Surveying of Critical Mineral Potential Active

Science Issue and Relevance

USGS holds the responsibility to assess the mineral endowment for the Nation and Executive Order 13817, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals (2017), sets the focus on critical minerals. The USGS is tasked with assessing all critical mineral resources in the U.S., including potential critical mineral resources in mining wastes. Traditional methods and current technology to conduct national mineral resource assessments are labor intensive, since much work is done manually. In order to conduct critical mineral assessments in a timely manner, new approaches must be developed to facilitate more efficient critical mineral resource assessments. 

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Methods to Address Issue

Based on the mandate to assess critical mineral distributions in the U.S., the USGS Mineral Resources Program entered a partnership with DARPA. The partnership objective is to accelerate advances in science for understanding critical minerals, assessing unknown resources, and increase mineral security for the Nation. In order to accomplish the goal of assessing 50 critical minerals in a timely manner, the project draws upon expertise from USGS as well as other partners to collaborate to develop approaches in aspects such as data management/machine learning/artificial intelligence to facilitate more efficient critical mineral resource assessments.  

USGS will contribute expertise in economic geology, geophysics, geochemistry, critical mineral supply chains, and other areas of Earth science as needed. Areas that may be included are: 

• Rapid and accurate multi-modal characterization of geological features
• Data-driven prediction of optical flight paths and platforms for data collection
• Data-driven models for prediction of mineral deposit information
• Data-driven prediction of critical mineral availability from non-traditional sources

DARPA opened a competition to help automate some of the current manual inspections of geological images and reports. There were two mini-challenges that were opened, Map Georeferencing and Map Feature Extraction.

• DARPA AI for Critical Mineral Assessment Competition 
• DARPA News Release (8/15/22): DARPA Critical Minerals Competition Uses AI to Accelerate Analytics

DARPA opened up an Artificial Intelligence Opportunity: DARPA Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support (Critical MAAS)