The main kinds of ore deposit
From copper porphyries to beach placers, seven deposit types explain where most of the world's metals and minerals come…
How a porphyry copper deposit forms
Porphyry copper deposits form when magma stalls beneath a volcano and releases metal-rich fluids into the surrounding rock…
What weathering does to an orebody
How millions of years of rain and heat strip rock apart, leaving behind concentrated deposits of nickel, bauxite and…
Brines, salars and evaporites
Lithium, potash, boron and iodine concentrate in ancient lake beds and brines. Solar evaporation does most of the…
Banded iron formations
Banded iron formations are ancient seafloor sediments that record Earth's first oxygenated oceans and now supply most of…
How a deposit is found
From the first magnetic anomaly to the first ore tonne: how geologists narrow a planet's worth of rock to a single mine.
Open pit or underground?
How mining engineers decide between digging down from the surface or tunnelling underground, and what drives the switch…
Grade, cut-off and why they move
Grade measures how much metal sits in a tonne of rock. Cut-off grade decides whether that rock is worth mining at all — and…
Mining without digging
How in-situ recovery and heap leaching extract metal by dissolving it underground or in engineered piles, without…
Artisanal and small-scale mining
Millions of people mine by hand, supplying a significant share of some critical materials. Here is what that means for the…
The life of a mine
From first rock sample to final rehabilitation, a mine takes decades to build, run and close — here is why that timeline is…
Tailings and waste rock
Most of what a mine digs up is not the product. This article explains where that material goes and why it matters.
Battery chemistries, compared
NMC, LFP and sodium-ion batteries each draw on a different set of minerals. Here is what that means for the mines behind…
How a permanent magnet works
Permanent magnets store invisible force in their atomic structure. Here is why some do it a thousand times better than…
What a solar panel is made of
A standard solar panel is mostly glass and aluminium, but the materials that make it work — silicon and silver — tell a…
The nuclear fuel cycle
From powdered yellowcake to ceramic fuel pellet, the nuclear fuel cycle passes through chemistry, enrichment and…
Electrolysers and the iridium problem
PEM and alkaline electrolysers split water in different ways, and their contrasting material needs shape where green…
Making steel without coal
How steelmakers are replacing coking coal with hydrogen and electricity, and why the world's scrap supply sets a hard limit…