Board on Earth Sciences and Resources Spring Meeting 2026: Derisking the Future: Continental Drilling for Resource Exploration and Management
Enabling and advancing critical and emerging technologies is the top research and development budget priority of the United States. However, current resource limitations on minerals, energy, and water can hinder domestic development, growth, and commercialization of emerging technologies. The critical minerals needed for advanced technologies, the energy to power advanced manufacturing, and the groundwater resources to support AI and advanced computing all lie in the subsurface. A new generation of pre-competitive, high-fidelity subsurface information is needed to quantify domestic resource potential and determine how best to economically and responsibly extract these resources. Whereas technologies do exist to broadly image the distribution of materials below the surface of the Earth, the gold standard for exploration of the subsurface is to drill wells and obtain cores to directly study these subsurface materials. Drilling core samples and collecting associated downhole data carries technical risk, requires significant capital investment, and produces a large volume of rock samples that must be properly collected, described, analyzed, curated, and maintained over the long term.
When:
Monday, June 15, 2026, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Where:
Attend virtually:
You will receive the relevant link(s) to attend virtually via email.