Critical Materials Atlas
Method · from orbit

Do the satellites corroborate the supply map?

Every other page measures concentration from trade and production statistics. This one adds an independent physical lens: where mining actually scars the ground, seen from space — 44,929 mapped mine polygons across 145 countries — set beside the atlas’s critical-material producers, with flagship mines snapped to their real satellite footprints. A companion page maps where mining is physically expanding →.

An independent physical check on the supply map: how much mine footprint each country actually shows from orbit, set beside the producers the atlas already names.
Source, and the all-commodity caveat

Source: Maus et al. (2022, Scientific Data) — a peer-reviewed dataset of mine-area polygons from Sentinel-2 imagery (~2019). I aggregate physical mine footprint (km² and site count) per country and lay it beside the production geography the atlas already shows.

Caveat: these polygons are all-commodity (coal, iron, gold and more) with no reliable per-mineral label, so the country map is total mining intensity, not critical-material-specific — the flagship sites below carry the material-specific view. We quantified exactly how far commodity labelling gets →: even with the best open mine database bolted on, only ~4% of the mapped footprint can be tied to a tracked critical material.

Mine footprint from space — and flagship critical-material mines

Shading = total mapped mine area per country (darker = more). Dots = curated flagship mines, sized by their nearest mapped footprint. Hover for detail.

Shade: country mine footprint (km²)● flagship critical-material mine (hover)

Top mine-footprint countries vs their critical-material role

“Major CM” = number of the atlas’s 32 materials for which this country holds ≥10% of mine production. Where a big footprint lines up with a high CM count, the satellites corroborate the supply story.

Countrymine area km²sitesmajor CMleading critical materials

Flagship mines, snapped to their satellite footprint

MineMaterialCountryfootprint km²

Footprint = total mapped Maus mine area within 25 km of each mine — a district-scale, all-commodity footprint, not just the single pit. Source: Maus et al. 2022, PANGAEA → satellite.json. Imagery ~2019.