Mineral Resource Assessments

The Alaska Resource Data File (ARDF) site provides descriptions of mines, prospects, and mineral occurrences for individual U.S. Geological Survey 1:250,000-scale quadrangles in Alaska.

The USGS Mineral Resources Program entered a partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The partnership objective is to accelerate advances in science for understanding critical minerals, assessing unknown resources, and increase mineral security for the Nation so USGS can more efficiently assess critical mineral deposits within the United States.

Our objective is to develop a national-scale, geospatial database that is the authoritative source of the most important mines, mineral deposits, and mineral districts of the United States.

The rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of metals with unique physical and chemical properties that are critical to a variety of technological applications. For example, neodymium (Nd) is a REE used to manufacture high strength, lightweight magnets that power electric motors at all scales, from cell phones to airplanes. Reliance on REE imports puts the U.S. at high risk for supply disruption...

We will publish reports and interpretive papers on existing data from USGS internal mineral resource assessment collaborative work.

Assessing the mineral resources of the United States represents a core function of the Energy and Minerals Mission Area since the inception of the U.S. Geological Survey under the Organic Act of 1879. As reaffirmed by the Energy Policy Act of 2020, assessment of identified and undiscovered resources of critical mineral commodities continues to form a focal point of the Mineral Resources Program...

The purpose of this project is to update the current gridded products created from the North American airborne gamma ray spectrometry data using new statistical techniques to analyze spatial data and to create higher quality national airborne radiometric grids.

The USGS Mineral Resources Program conducts mineral resource assessments and is training USGS scientists in how to conduct these assessments for future work. As a practical exercise, the scientists will conduct an assessment for tungsten in the U.S.

Project objectives are to develop a modern probabilistic quantitative mineral resource assessment of Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and adjacent geologically similar areas that examines the potential for minerals-based economic development and trade within the region.

The Development of Assessment Techniques and Analysis Project (DATAPII) objective is to modernize the application and development of USGS mineral resource and integrated multiresource assessment methodologies and capacity that are applicable at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, and national and international in scope.

We are assessing the extent of industrial mineral resources hosted by heavy-mineral sands in the coastal plain of the southeastern United States. “Heavy-mineral sands" (HMS) is a term commonly used in industry and geologic literature to describe layered sediments deposited in coastal environments that contain dense (“heavy") minerals of economic value. The heavy minerals extracted from these...

USGS Mineral Deposit Models are "an organized arrangement of information describing the essential characteristics or properties of a class of mineral deposits. Models themselves can be classified according to their essential attributes (for example: descriptive, grade-tonnage models, genetic, geoenvironmental, geophysical, probability of occurrence, and quantitative process models)." (Stoeser and...