A rare earth elements map plots the known deposits and occurrences of the 15 lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium, usually coloured by deposit type and linked to grade, tonnage and mineralogy. The most complete public versions come from national geological surveys: the U.S. Geological Survey’s global rare earth database holds more than 3,100 located deposits and occurrences, and Geoscience Australia and Natural Resources Canada publish national maps and project lists. Used well, a map like this is the first filter for rare earth exploration.

Try it: Rare earth deposit screen: contained TREO and NdPr value →

Used badly, it is a list of dots. Many occurrences on any rare earth deposits map are single samples or small showings, and the elements themselves are hard to separate once mined. The USGS rare earths summary puts it neatly: rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust, but minable concentrations are less common than for most other mineral commodities. The rest of this guide is about telling the two apart. It belongs to our deposit series, which starts from our mining prospecting guide to deposit types and field signs.

“Rare earths are relatively abundant in the crust, but minable concentrations are uncommon, says the USGS.”

Which rare earth elements map to use

There is no single official global map, but a few free datasets cover most needs. They differ in scope, currency and detail, so it helps to know what each one is for.

USGS maps and databases

The USGS MRData rare earth element deposits map is the quickest way to see deposits containing rare earths and yttrium worldwide, with grade and tonnage and mineralogy in each record. Behind it sits the global rare earth element occurrence database, a GIS geodatabase with more than 3,100 records that have latitudes and longitudes and more than 800 without plottable locations. It documents mineralogy, deposit or occurrence type, host rocks and alteration, and any public size and grade data. For a rare earth elements deposits map you can load into QGIS or ArcGIS, that is the file to download.

Australia and Canada

Geoscience Australia publishes a web map service of Australia’s Identified Mineral Resources showing operating mines, developments, care-and-maintenance sites and resource deposits for critical minerals. It has also produced a national mineral potential assessment for carbonatite-related rare earth systems, which predicts known carbonatites and deposits while highlighting under-explored areas. In Canada, Natural Resources Canada’s rare earth elements facts page lists projects by province, including Nechalacho in the Northwest Territories, Wicheeda in British Columbia, Alces Lake in Saskatchewan and Strange Lake in Quebec.

How to read a rare earth elements map for your own licence

Suppose your licence sits 40 km from three dots on the USGS layer. What do you do with that? The answer depends on what the dots are, how they relate to the rocks under your ground, and whether the national survey has flown radiometrics over the area. A rare earth elements map is a starting hypothesis, and the work is turning it into a testable one.

1. Download, don’t just browse. Pull the records for a generous buffer around your licence into GIS, so you can filter by deposit type and see the attribute fields.
2. Sort by type and evidence. Separate carbonatite, alkaline, placer and clay records from phosphorite and vein occurrences, then flag which have grade and tonnage and which are just a mineral name.
3. Overlay the geology. Put the rare earth elements map on the national geological map. Dots that share a host unit or intrusive suite with your ground matter far more than dots that are simply close.
4. Add radiometrics and magnetics. Thorium highs and circular magnetic features are the national-survey layers that most often point to rare earth hosts.
5. Check the cadastre. The best-looking ground near a known occurrence is often already held; confirm what is open before you plan fieldwork.

Do this properly and the map stops being a picture and becomes a ranked list. It also tells you what you do not know. Many regions look empty on a rare earth elements map simply because nobody has sampled for the full element suite, which is why prospectivity models such as Geoscience Australia’s carbonatite assessment highlight under-explored areas rather than only known ones.

Common mistakes when using a rare earth deposits map

• Treating every dot as a deposit. Occurrences with no tonnage are leads, not resources.
• Ignoring the element mix. Total REO says little about value when neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium carry most of it.
• Forgetting age of the data. Grades and tonnages in these databases are dated company figures, such as the 2012 Mountain Pass reserves; always find the latest statement.
• ⚠ Assuming nearby means similar. A carbonatite dot tells you little about a granite-hosted clay profile a few kilometres away.

The deposit types a rare earth elements map shows

The USGS circular Rare Earth Element Mineral Deposits in the United States reviews seven types: carbonatites, alkaline igneous rocks, sedimentary phosphorites, rare-earth-rich veins, iron oxide deposits with rare-earth-bearing apatite, monazite-xenotime placers (heavy mineral sands) and ion-adsorption clays. A separate USGS review notes that four of those, carbonatite, alkaline igneous, heavy mineral sand and regolith-hosted ion-adsorption clay, supply the global market.

Carbonatites

Carbonatites are rare igneous rocks made mostly of carbonate minerals, and they host some of the richest deposits. Mountain Pass in California is the US example: the USGS circular cites proven and probable reserves of 18.4 million tonnes of carbonatite ore averaging 7.98 percent rare earth oxide (REO) at a 5 percent cut-off (Molycorp, 2012), with the ore made of calcite, dolomite, barite and bastnaesite. The same circular lists Bear Lodge in Wyoming, with 15.6 million tonnes at 2.78 percent total REO (Rare Element Resources, 2015), and Elk Creek in Nebraska, a niobium-rich carbonatite about 200 m below surface. In Western Australia, Geoscience Australia describes Mount Weld as one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world, mined from laterite developed over a carbonatite about 2,025 million years old.

Alkaline igneous rocks

These are silica-poor intrusions enriched in sodium and potassium, and the USGS circular reviews them as a separate deposit class; Bokan Mountain in Alaska, with rare-earth-rich vein-dikes in an alkaline igneous complex, is one of its US examples. Geoscience Australia notes that hard-rock styles such as carbonatite and peralkaline intrusions often require complex processing pathways, which is the recurring catch with this family.

Heavy mineral sands

Coastal and river sands concentrate dense minerals, including monazite and xenotime. The USGS notes that monazite typically contains small amounts of thorium, making it radioactive, and that xenotime, a yttrium phosphate, generally carries substantial heavy rare earths. USGS reports that monazite was produced from heavy mineral sand concentrates in the southeastern United States in 2025.

Ion-adsorption clays

Weathered granites in warm, wet climates can hold rare earths loosely bound to clay minerals, which makes them easy to leach. A study in Nature Communications notes that global heavy rare earth resources are dominantly sourced from Chinese regolith-hosted ion-adsorption deposits, and showed that prospective clays on Madagascar hold rare earths in the same easily leachable, adsorbed form, mainly on kaolinite. Geoscience Australia runs a project to improve knowledge of clay-hosted and ionic adsorption deposits in Australia, which often have favourable environmental and processing outcomes.

Rare earth deposits map by country: production and reserves

The 2026 USGS summary estimates world mine production at about 390,000 tonnes of REO in 2025. China’s figure, 270,000 tonnes, is a production quota and excludes undocumented output. The United States produced about 51,000 tonnes of REO in mineral concentrates, mainly bastnaesite from Mountain Pass, and Australia about 29,000 tonnes. Nigeria appears on the list at 1,500 tonnes.

Supply concentration is the policy story. The USGS records that in April 2025 China tightened export controls on several heavy rare earths (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium), expanded them in October to more elements, then suspended the October controls for one year in November, while the April controls stayed in effect. Earlier, the USGS circular noted that China produced about 84 percent of world rare earths between 2011 and 2017.

Reserves are spread more widely than production

World reserves exceed 85 million tonnes of REO. China holds about 44 million, Brazil 21 million and Australia 6.3 million (3.3 million JORC-compliant or equivalent), followed by Russia, Vietnam, the United States and Greenland. In North America, measured and indicated resources were estimated at 3.6 million tonnes in the United States and more than 14 million tonnes in Canada; NRCan puts Canada’s known resources at over 15.2 million tonnes of REO in 2024, although the country is not yet a commercial producer.

Grades, prices and what a rare earth deposit is worth

Grades vary by an order of magnitude between deposit types, and the mix of individual elements matters as much as the total. Here are the published grades for carbonatite examples named in the USGS circular and by Geoscience Australia.

Most of the value in a typical light rare earth deposit sits in neodymium and praseodymium, the magnet metals. The USGS price series shows how volatile that is: NdPr oxide averaged about US$92 per kilogram in 2021, US$124 in 2022, US$75 in 2023, US$55 in 2024 and US$69 in 2025, while lanthanum and cerium oxides stayed near US$1 to US$2. A deposit rich in cerium and lanthanum but poor in NdPr can have a high total grade and a modest value.

How rare earth exploration works

Rare earth elements exploration follows the usual funnel, but with a few tools that matter more than for other metals. Radiometrics is one: thorium and uranium often travel with rare earth minerals.

Geophysics that has found deposits

The USGS circular records that Elk Creek in Nebraska, buried about 200 m deep, was discovered in 1970 by a regional airborne geophysical survey. On the US Atlantic Coastal Plain, USGS studies used regional airborne radiometric data to find elevated thorium in coastal sediments, indicative of monazite, and combined it with titanium in stream sediments to outline areas permissive for heavy mineral sands. Our guide to aeromagnetic and radiometric surveys covers how those datasets are flown and processed.

What satellites can and cannot see

Some rare earths have their own spectral fingerprints. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports used the EnMAP hyperspectral satellite, at 30 m pixels, to map neodymium at Mountain Pass through its absorption features near 740 and 800 nm. The authors are careful about limits: even 1 percent iron oxides can dampen the features, vegetation interferes, and the smallest detectable target and lowest detectable neodymium level at that pixel size are still unknown. Our explainer on hyperspectral mineral mapping for gold and rare earths covers the sensors.

Satellites also map the setting, which is the layer a rare earth elements map usually lacks: carbonatite and alkaline complexes, lateritic weathering profiles, heavy-mineral-bearing coastlines and drainage, and in some regions mining itself. The USGS has published point locations of leachate tanks used to extract rare earths from ion-adsorption clays in Burma and China, identified from satellite imagery between 2010 and 2025, to monitor extraction and estimate deposit extent.

A practical sequence for rare earth exploration

1. Screen with the maps. Load the USGS rare earth elements map data and any national prospectivity map, and check which deposit types lie in your region.
2. Map the geology from orbit. Identify intrusive complexes, weathering profiles, sands and structures across your licence.
3. Fly or buy radiometrics and magnetics where they exist; many national surveys are free.
4. Sample and assay the full suite. Report every rare earth element, thorium and uranium, not just a total.
5. Test mineralogy early. Mineral hosts and grain size decide whether a deposit can be processed.
6. Drill the survivors, then run leach or beneficiation tests before any resource talk.

Where our satellite screening fits

Our satellite-based mineral detection covers step 2 for rare earth elements and other target minerals. We analyse multispectral and hyperspectral imagery of your licence, where each mineral and alteration zone has its own spectral signature, and flag likely mineralised zones, alteration halos, faults, fractures and deposit-associated patterns. You send coordinates, a KML/KMZ file or a polygon plus your target minerals, and we deliver in 5–20 business days.

• 📊 Deliverables: high-potential zones, prospectivity heatmaps, estimated location and depth ranges, geological interpretation, and PDF plus georeferenced GIS files that sit alongside your rare earth elements map layers.
• 📊 Premium+: TargetMax™ Drilling Intelligence with drilling-angle recommendations and 3D subsurface models.
• Economics: exploration timelines from months to days and up to 80–85% lower early-exploration cost, with no ground disturbance at the screening stage.
• Experience: 100,000+ hectares scanned for 20+ mineral types in 25+ countries.

Draw your area on mining.farmonaut.com: Map Your Mining Site, or see a sample of satellite-driven 3D mineral prospectivity mapping.

Rare earth exploration companies and projects: reading the map as an investor

Searches for rare earth exploration companies usually start from a map. On a rare earth elements map, a company project and a museum-specimen occurrence can look identical, so the dots are only part of the story. Most of the projects on the NRCan list, for example, are at pre-feasibility, feasibility or preliminary assessment stage, and Canada is described as not yet a commercial producer despite very large resources. In the United States, the USGS notes that at least five companies were developing commercial heavy rare earth processing and refining capacity in 2025, but none produced sustained commercial-scale quantities.

• Deposit type: carbonatite, alkaline, sand or ionic clay each carry different processing risks.
• Element mix: how much of the grade is NdPr, dysprosium and terbium, versus cerium and lanthanum?
• Radioactivity: thorium and uranium content and how the company plans to handle it.
• Processing route: concentrate only, or separated oxides, and who will do the separation.
• ⚠ Headline grade alone is a weak signal; ask for the full element distribution.

For how exploration companies are funded and valued in general, see our guide to exploration companies across gold, uranium and lithium. Farmonaut is not an investment adviser and does not rank or recommend companies.

“EnMAP mapped neodymium at Mountain Pass from orbit, at 30 metre pixels.”

Frequently asked questions

Reviewed September 2026 against the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 rare earths chapters, USGS Circular 1454 on US rare earth deposits, the USGS MRData rare earth map and global occurrence database, the USGS ion-adsorption tank dataset, Geoscience Australia’s rare earth research pages and carbonatite potential assessment, Natural Resources Canada’s rare earth facts, and studies in Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.

Deposits are named only as geological examples from those sources, with their original dates; Farmonaut did not discover them. Figures change each year: check the linked sources for the latest. Satellite targets are exploration targets, not mineral resources, and must be confirmed by sampling and drilling. Nothing here is investment advice.