This book provides a normative framework for making decisions concerning mineral resource exploration under conditions of uncertainty.

Policy makers, mineral exploration experts, and regional planners decide how public lands, which may contain undiscovered resources, should be used or whether to invest in exploration for minerals on a regular basis. Decisions are also made concerning mineral resource adequacy, national policy, and regional development. This book makes explicit the factors that can affect a mineral-related decision so that decision-makers can clearly see the possible consequences of their decisions. Based on work done at the US Geological Survey, the authors address the question of the kinds of issues decision-makers are trying to resolve and what forms of information would aid in resolving these issues. The goal of the process discussed is to offer unbiased quantitative assessments in a format needed in decision-support systems so that consequences of alternative courses of action can be examined with respect to land use or mineral-resource development. An integrated approach focuses on three assessment parts and the models that support them. Although the concepts presented are straightforward and understandable, in assessments, carefully listening to the experts in other disciplines leads to better products. Navigating through and making sense of QRA requires not just learning rules and equations, but life experiences and common sense. The judgment required to understand which tools to apply are best learned by example and experience. This will be useful to governmental or industrial policy makers, managers of explorations, planners of regional development, and similar decision-makers.

This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) reminiscences covering related topics like mathematical geosciences, mathematical morphology, geostatistics, fractals and multifractals, spatial statistics, multipoint geostatistics, compositional data analysis, informatics, geocomputation, numerical methods, and chaos theory in the geosciences.

Mineral resource estimation has changed considerably in the past 25 years: geostatistical techniques have become commonplace and continue to evolve; computational horsepower has revolutionized all facets of numerical modeling; mining and processing operations are often larger; and uncertainty quantification is becoming standard practice. Recent books focus on historical methods or details of geostatistical theory. So there is a growing need to collect and synthesize the practice of modern mineral resource estimation into a book for undergraduate students, beginning graduate students, and young geologists and engineers. It is especially fruitful that this book is written by authors with years of relevant experience performing mineral resource estimation and with years of relevant teaching experience. This comprehensive textbook and reference fills this need.

Minerals are part of virtually every product we use. Common examples include copper used in electrical wiring and titanium used to make airplane frames and paint pigments. The Information Age has ushered in a number of new mineral uses in a number of products including cell phones (e.g., tantalum) and liquid crystal displays (e.g., indium). For some minerals, such as the platinum group metals used to make cataytic converters in cars, there is no substitute. If the supply of any given mineral were to become restricted, consumers and sectors of the U.S. economy could be significantly affected. Risks to minerals supplies can include a sudden increase in demand or the possibility that natural ores can be exhausted or become too difficult to extract. Minerals are more vulnerable to supply restrictions if they come from a limited number of mines, mining companies, or nations. Baseline information on minerals is currently collected at the federal level, but no established methodology has existed to identify potentially critical minerals. This book develops such a methodology and suggests an enhanced federal initiative to collect and analyze the additional data needed to support this type of tool.