MineTRACE System Offers Evidence-Grounded Mineral Exploration

Mineral exploration traditionally involves synthesizing diverse geochemical, geophysical, and geological data, often relying on systems that provide opaque scores or heatmaps without clear explanations. To address this lack of transparency, a new web-based system called MineTRACE has been developed. This system offers evidence-grounded exploration capabilities for eight key commodities: copper, gold, nickel, tungsten, tin, cobalt, tantalum, and manganese. MineTRACE allows users to interactively explore prospectivity maps, query specific locations or regions, and inspect the underlying supporting evidence. A natural language conversational assistant further enhances usability by retrieving scores and evidence from the analysis pipeline and presenting them in an understandable format. The system's core is a transparent expert tree, which combines multi-source evidence based on geological knowledge and known deposits to generate interpretable prospectivity scores. The scoring mechanism achieves high spatial AUC values, up to 0.917, across various test scenarios. End-to-end evaluations confirm the accuracy of queries and the grounding of responses. By making public geoscience data more accessible, interpretable, and verifiable, MineTRACE aims to support more efficient and transparent mineral exploration processes.