Provenance

Data sources

Every provider used, by name, with what it supplies and how often it refreshes.

U.S. Geological Survey — Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026

The backbone of the site. World mine production and reserves by country, U.S. salient statistics (production, imports, exports, consumption, stocks, employment, capacity), net import reliance, major import sources, annual average prices, the 2025 U.S. critical minerals designation, and national export controls. Public domain. Loaded verbatim; refreshed when the USGS publishes a new edition, normally each January. Data release ↗

Financial Modeling Prep

Delayed share prices, market values and company profiles for the listed companies in the atlas. Refreshed daily. Delayed, typically 15–20 minutes or more, and shown for reference only.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED)

Long-run monthly commodity price series, carrying International Monetary Fund primary commodity price data. Used where a monthly series exists for a material and labelled with the exact IMF series being shown.

Wikimedia Commons

All photography. Only public-domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA files are accepted; non-commercial and no-derivatives licences are excluded programmatically. Title, author, licence, licence URL and file page are stored for every image and printed beneath it.

News publishers

Headlines, publication times and the publishers' own feed summaries, from public RSS feeds intended for syndication. Every item names its publisher and links out to it. No article body is copied and no article is rewritten. Current feeds include MINING.COM, The Northern Miner, Mining Technology, World Nuclear News, OilPrice.com, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy, IEEE Spectrum, Phys.org, CleanTechnica and BBC Business. Public-relations wires and paid-placement outlets are excluded.

Editorial compilation

The graph itself — which minerals carry which metals, which mines and plants exist and who operates them, which companies and end markets sit downstream, and how the stages connect — is compiled by this site from public company reporting, government datasets and standard reference works. It is the part most likely to age, and the part we most want corrections on.

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