Critical Minerals in Ores (CMiO) Database factsheet

Critical minerals are commodities essential to modern industrial and strategic technologies and are highly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. The Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (CMMI) is a collaboration among the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Geological Survey of Canada, and Geoscience Australia that aims to deepen global understanding of where critical minerals are located. A key output of this initiative is the Critical Minerals in Ores (CMiO) database that is advancing our collective understanding of critical minerals distributions. For instance, publicly available data on the concentrations of many critical minerals are sparse because these commodities can only be produced in small, yet essential, quantities compared to the primary commodities like copper and zinc. The CMiO database helps bridge this gap by offering high-quality, multielement geochemical data from a wide variety of critical mineral-bearing deposits around the world. Importantly, it uses a novel consensus deposit environment, group, and type classification scheme developed by the agencies that allows comparisons among ore deposits from different regions. The CMiO database contains geochemical data for more than 20,000 samples from more than 100 deposit types comprising 10 deposit environments. Citation: Case, G.N.D., Graham, G.E., Lawley, C.J.M., Bastrakov, E., Huston, D.L., Hofstra, A.H., Lisitsin, V., Hawkins, S.G., and Wang, B., 2025, Critical Minerals in Ores (CMiO) database: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2025–3002, 2 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20253002.