China ranks first in the world in reserves of 14 minerals including rare earths, tungsten and tin.

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Today (the 11th), the latest report released by the Ministry of Natural Resources at the 2026 (28th) China International Mining Conference shows that by the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, China ranked first in the world in reserves of 14 minerals including rare earths, tungsten and tin. In 2025, China's geological exploration investment grew positively for the fifth consecutive year, and important progress continued to be made in mineral prospecting, with 200 new non-oil and gas mineral deposits discovered nationwide.

At the conference, the Ministry of Natural Resources also released two major achievements: the "Intelligent Mapping" system and the "Intelligent Prospecting" system.

■ "Intelligent Mapping" System

Geological mapping is like drawing a "geological navigation map" for the "underground mineral world," clarifying the distribution patterns of strata, structures and rocks. It is the most fundamental and critical preliminary work for discovering mineralization clues and pinpointing prospecting targets.

Qu Honggang, deputy director of the Natural Resources Comprehensive Survey Command Center of the China Geological Survey, introduced that so-called "intelligent mapping" means turning the methods, experience and knowledge accumulated by geologists over nearly a century of mapping into a computable knowledge base, and applying deep learning methods to discover the correlations of geological features of geological objects, thereby accurately reflecting and expressing the spatial distribution morphology, extension direction and interrelationships of geological bodies.

Data shows that the system's geological body identification accuracy exceeds 90% overall, and the efficiency of data processing, comprehensive analysis and geological mapping is improved by more than 50% compared with traditional methods, truly achieving quality and efficiency improvement.

■ "Intelligent Prospecting" System

Qu Honggang introduced that the "Intelligent Prospecting" system released this time can drive geological prospecting from "experience-driven" to "intelligence-driven," enabling the delineation of prospecting prospective areas in metallogenic belts, the delineation of prospecting targets in ore concentration areas, and the localization of ore bodies in the deep and marginal parts of mines, effectively solving the pain points of previous work.

How to prospect? Qu Honggang introduced that first the "baseline data" is "fed" to the system, and it will combine the geological background, metallogenic laws, deposit models, prediction models and other knowledge graphs totaling millions of entries integrated in the system, as well as more than 200 data processing, analysis and evaluation algorithms for geology, gravity, magnetic methods, electrical methods, geochemistry, remote sensing, etc., to carry out analysis. It is equivalent to a super "data analysis advisor," thereby delineating favorable prospecting areas and exploration targets, generating three-dimensional geological structure models, resource prediction and evaluation conclusions, as well as professional maps and analysis reports, providing decision-making basis for regional layout, project arrangement, drilling hole placement and other work.

In the West Qinling gold mine, the "Intelligent Prospecting" system completed in only 5 days a workload that originally required more than a month, quickly identifying and delineating 2 gold prospecting targets and 4 favorable prospecting areas. At present, this system has been applied to metallogenic belts such as Qinling, Jiaodong, Wuyishan and West Junggar, ore concentration areas such as the Chuanshi volcanic basin and Saertuohai, and mining areas such as Bayan Obo and Zaozigou.

The China Geological Survey has already discussed application cooperation for this system with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, sharing China's technical experience in intelligent prospecting with the world.