Critical minerals are essential to technologies ranging from renewable energy to electronics. Meeting growing demand requires progress across the full value chain, including ore-forming processes, geological exploration, environmentally responsible mining, extraction and separation, recovery from waste streams and geothermal systems, recycling, and life cycle analysis. These challenges cannot be addressed within disciplinary silos. They require integration of geochemistry, mineralogy, petrology, hydrology, engineering, environmental science, and policy. Additionally, physics-based AI tools potentially offer advanced predictive capabilities to accelerate recovery and refinement.

This session aims to bring together researchers working across these areas to identify knowledge gaps, connect fundamental science with use-inspired research and applications, and explore how cross-disciplinary approaches can accelerate advances in critical minerals research. We welcome contributions spanning experimental, modeling, field-based studies of critical minerals, as well as work on policy, sustainability, and education that helps train the next generation of scientists to address the critical minerals value chain.

• B - Biogeosciences
• GC - Global Environmental Change
• V - Volcanology, Geochemistry and Petrology