The deep dive

Every mineral has a problem. Usually five.

A rare-earth price is the end of a long chain of geology, chemistry, radioactivity, freight and other people's labor. Hover or tap a mineral to read its dossier — where it's dug, why it's hard, who controls it, what it costs the people and places that produce it, and how its price has behaved when the world panicked. Prices in each dossier come from the same live tracker as the hub.

⚗️ The separation gauntlet

All 17 elements come out of the ground mixed, and adjacent lanthanides differ by a single proton — chemically, they're near-clones. Separating them means solvent extraction: hundreds of mixer-settler stages, acid and kerosene-based extractants, repeated until purity reaches 99.5–99.99%. This chemistry, more than mining, is where the industry lives — and where China built its lead.

☢️ The thorium problem

The richest rare-earth ore, monazite, carries 4–12% thorium oxide — radioactive, with few legal places to put it. Thorium waste is the main reason the West walked away in the 1990s: Mountain Pass, California leaked radioactive wastewater across the Mojave and shut in 2002; Australia's Lynas spent a decade fighting Malaysia over where its residue may stay. Every rare-earth supply chain has a radioactive shadow.

🇨🇳 Two different numbers

China mines roughly 70% of the world's rare earths (270,000 of 390,000 t, USGS 2024) — but it performs about 90% of the separation and makes about 90% of the magnets. Mines outside China mostly still ship concentrate into that system. "Diversifying mining" without diversifying separation changes the map, not the dependency.

📅 The calendar of control

Apr 4, 2025: export licensing imposed on Sm, Gd, Tb, Dy, Lu, Sc, Y and related magnets. Oct 2025: a far broader package announced, then suspended for a year — it expires Nov 10, 2026. Jan 1, 2027: US defense rules (DFARS) extend to the entire NdFeB magnet supply chain. The dossiers below are what those dates feel like from inside the market.

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Imagery: macro photographs generated for this page (oxide powders, metals and ores as labeled) — illustrative, not product photography. Dossier sources: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries; SMM weekly reviews (Oct 2026); S&P Global assessments via Rare Earth Exchanges (Sep–Oct 2026); IEA and CSIS supply-chain analyses; EU Joint Research Centre and MDPI magnet-content reviews; Edison Group rare-earth research (2026); environmental reporting on Myanmar's Kachin clay fields by Global Witness and wire services. Prices: the tracker, same data, same dates.