Mineral Resources Program
Mineral Resource Assessments
Mineral resource assessments are tools used for projecting the potential for undiscovered domestic and global deposits of minerals such as copper and rare-earth elements. Land management agencies, industry and the public use this mineral resource information to help project future resource development.
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USMIN Mineral Deposit Database
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.
Update of North American Airborne Radiometric Survey Data Using Advanced Statistical Techniques and Parallel Computing
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.
Mineral Resource Assessment Training
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.
Mineral Resource Assessment of U.S. Territories of the Caribbean Basin Archipelago including Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and Adjacent Areas
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.
Development of Assessment Techniques and Analysis
The Development of Assessment Techniques and Analysis Project (DATAP) 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.
Alaska Resource Data File
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.
Heavy-Mineral Sand Resources in the Southeastern U.S.
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...
New Mineral Deposit Models for Gold, Phosphate Rare Earth Elements, and Placer Rare Earth Element-Titanium Resources
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)." (...
ASTRA: ASTeroid Resource Assessment
The study was conducted to determine if the USGS process for conducting mineral resource assessments on Earth can be applied to asteroids
Sagebrush Mineral Resource Assessment
The USGS Mineral Resources Program completed a comprehensive assessment and inventory of potential mineral resources covering approximately10 million acres of federal and adjacent lands in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.
Global Assessment Applications
This project used the results of the USGS Global Mineral Resource Assessment project to illustrate how USGS provides science in support of policy and decision-making, and also maintained the project's data library.
Global Mineral Resource Assessments
In response to the growing demand for information on the global mineral-resource base, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed assessments for undiscovered resources of porphyry and sediment-hosted copper, platinum-group elements, and potash.