Frontiers in exploration research—A philosophical overview

Future exploration research will continue to enhance our ability to discover new mineral deposits by providing increasingly accurate descriptions, improving deposit modeling techniques, constructing new measurement and analytical instruments, developing new exploration techniques, predicting the abundance of ore deposits by region and domain, and estimating future supply. Field exploration geologists and laboratory researchers will be concerned with identifying not-yet-recognized deposit types. A good geologic map will remain the fundamental research tool.