120-20 National Mine Waste Inventory: U.S. Geological Survey and State Geological Survey Collaboration

Abstract:

Locating critical mineral resources continues to be a high priority for both government and industry groups. This interest extends beyond lode resources and includes identifying surficial mine waste features that may contain critical mineral resources. As part of the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative’s focus on determining potential critical mineral resources, the U.S. Geological Survey is collaborating with State Geological Surveys to develop a comprehensive database of non-fuel and above ground mine waste features that will aid in research and development of these unconventional critical mineral resources.

The National Mine Waste Inventory (NMWI) database aims to answer primary questions such as: (1) How many mine waste features are found in the U.S.? (2) Where are they located? (3) What type of mine waste is present? (4) How much total material do they contain? and (5) What are the commodity characteristics of the material? The NMWI database provides general information pertaining to feature type and location to answer the first three questions. Footprints of geospatial features can be coupled with digital elevation models to estimate volumes of individual features using recently published software (Jones et al., 2026), providing valuable data on waste material tonnage. The features are further characterized by defining the deposit type that was exploited for the mine, what commodities were produced, and what ore and gangue minerals are present. This data provides insight into what critical minerals may exist. All database entries are derived from publicly available sources. Features captured in the inventory have a spatial extent of 2,000 m² in area or larger.

Version 1 of the published NMWI database contains 764 mine waste features inventoried at 181 mine sites within Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia. Version 2 of the NMWI database will be published in the fall of 2026 and incorporates additional sites from Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The NMWI database will integrate new geographic areas in versioned updates.

Jones, J.M., Smith, A.S., Gaynor, S.P., Mauk, J.L., 2026, Geospatial tool for mine waste volume calculations from remote sensing source code, v1.0.0: U.S. Geological Survey Software Release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P14P7CJG

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 5, 2026

doi: 10.1130/abs/2026AM-19317

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