A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Now we have a story about the hunt for rare earth elements. China dominates the global supply, and the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find more critical minerals here, including some rare earths. They're important because they're needed to make tech products and also for the military. Shanna Lewis with member station KRCC takes us along on the search on the ground and in the air.
SHANNA LEWIS, BYLINE: At a small airport in the mountains of southern Colorado, geophysicist Angela Farr places a laptop inside a gleaming blue helicopter.
ANGELA FARR: Basically, my job is to make sure that the equipment's set up and collecting good data. And then...
LEWIS: Farr works for a contractor collecting data for the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth MRI Project, which maps the planet's surface and subterranean landscape. Farr points to a large box behind the pilot seat.
FARR: It has five crystals in it, four pointing down and one pointing upward. And that measures the radiation off the top couple of inches of the Earth and then what's coming from the sky.
LEWIS: A long, white boom called a stinger sticks out from the front of the helicopter. At its far end is a red bulb holding gadgetry to measure variations in the landscape's magnetic fields.
I'm sure everybody wants to know what's inside that red thing (laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah. I'm sure they do.
FARR: They really do. And then they're always disappointed.
LEWIS: She opens it up.
FARR: Then one thing you'll notice is there's no metal. It's polyethylene screws and it's wood because we don't want to introduce a local field.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER ENGINE FIRING UP)
LEWIS: Soon, the helicopter takes off. The pilot flies a grid of lines that's sort of like mowing the lawn at a constant height above the ground. Patricia MacQueen, with the Geological Survey, describes what the grid overlays.
PATRICIA MACQUEEN: Ancient volcano guts that got heated and munched over billions of years.
LEWIS: Those guts are already pretty well known. Prospectors swarmed over this territory starting in the 1800s. Some of it has been mined previously, and the USGS has mapped it multiple times over the decades. It's doing it again now because Congress has allocated more than $300 million to improve the maps. That started when President Trump called for more domestic mining in his first term. President Biden continued the work, and most of the money for it came from the bipartisan Infrastructure Act he signed in 2021.
Alright, so, where are we going?
BEN MAGNIN: Well, we're going to look at one of the outcrops near Salida.
LEWIS: Data gathered by sensors on helicopters is also ground-truthed by geologists like Ben Magnin formally with the USGS.
MAGNIN: So the first thing the geologists will do will go up to the outcrop and they'll bang on...
(SOUNDBITE OF ROCKS BANGING)
MAGNIN: ...The rock and try to pull off a sample.
LEWIS: Magnin follows up his low-tech rock hammer with a pocket-sized box called a magnetic susceptibility meter.
(SOUNDBITE OF HIGH-PITCHED BEEP)
MAGNIN: And so we just beep it once on the rock, once out in the air, and then it spits out a value. So this is low. This would not produce a magnetic anomaly in the airborne survey that we're flying.
LEWIS: So if an anomaly was detected by a helicopter here, it would be coming from underground, not the surface. This kind of work, overflights and ground-truthing and even a satellite partnership with NASA, is happening across the country from Alaska to Wisconsin and Florida. President Trump's 2026 budget request proposes spending another $137 million on exploration for minerals and energy resources in the U.S. For NPR News, I'm Shanna Lewis in southern Colorado.
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