Funding Agency: USGS; Period 2023-2024
The United States has determined a deficiency in data on the distribution of critical minerals in the U.S. Under the Presidential order, the Earth Mineral Resources Initiative (EMRI) program was initiated in 2018. Given the increasing demand for critical minerals, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was tasked to search for and secure critical mineral resources across the USA. One of the most promising settings for those deposits is the waste rock, tailings, or overburden in historic mines. Under this initiative, the Earth Sciences Remote Sensing Facility is conducting the following tasks. We examine the public domain digital databases in search for waste rock, tailings, or overburden reported in active, managed, and abandoned mines across the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, select sizable (>2000 m2) occurrences, quantify the volumes of mine waste in each of the occurrences, and develop a digital database to host the generated data.