ABSTRACT
The manufacture of metals of various types continues to be the most important application for mineral resources, but they are also used in construction and in the chemicals industry. Minerals’ are created by natural processes; they are transformed into ‘mineral resources’ by cultural processes such as advances in knowledge. The discovery of a new deposit is an obvious way of extending the life of a mineral resource. Although some of the most alarming predictions in Limits to Growth were focused on the availability of mineral resources, the prospect of physical scarcity seems more remote in the 1990s than it did in the 1970s. The majority of mineral resources are anything but ubiquitous and their spatial distribution is determined by complex relationships between the abundance of the elements which provide the raw materials for their creation and the chance combinations of geological circumstances which result in their formation or concentration in particular places.
