Recently, our research team's review paper titled "Applications and Prospects of Muography in Strategic Deposits" has been recommended by the editorial board of the international journal Minerals (Impact Factor = 3.6) and selected as an "Editor's Choice Article" for Volume 15, Issue 9 of the journal. This fully demonstrates that the research achievements of our team in the geological application of muography have gained high recognition from international peers.

Minerals is a renowned international SCI journal under MDPI, focusing on mineralogy, mineral deposits, and related fields. The "Editor's Choice Article" section is jointly curated by the journal's scientific editors worldwide. Editors carefully select a small number of articles from recently published works—these articles are either deemed to arouse special interest among readers or hold significant importance in their respective research areas. The core purpose of this section is to showcase some of the most groundbreaking and compelling cutting-edge achievements across various research fields of the journal, providing key academic references and directional guidance for researchers globally.

As the exploration of strategic mineral resources extends to deep and complex geological environments, traditional exploration methods face numerous challenges in ore-forming system analysis and precise orebody localization. This review paper systematically summarizes the development status of muography, focusing on in-depth analysis of four core themes: technical principles, practical applications in mineral exploration, existing challenges, and optimization prospects. Leveraging the strong penetrability of cosmic-ray muons, muography records their transmission trajectories through high-precision detector arrays and constructs underground density distribution images using advanced 3D inversion algorithms, enabling non-destructive detection of deep orebodies. It exhibits unique advantages particularly in delineating blind orebodies through thick overburdens and high-resistivity rock masses, improving exploration efficiency, and reducing costs. Meanwhile, based on existing research ideas, the paper summarizes and prospects directions such as multi-source geophysical data fusion, acquisition strategy optimization, detector performance enhancement, and intelligent data processing, providing references for addressing key issues currently faced by muography, including event analysis, long data acquisition cycles, and identification of low-density difference strata.

The selection of this paper not only reflects the recognition of our team's research achievements by the Minerals journal but also marks that China's research on the application of muography in strategic mineral resource exploration has entered the international forefront. Moving forward, our team will take this opportunity to continuously deepen the innovative research, development, and practical application of muography, facilitating breakthrough progress in ultra-deep ore-forming system exploration and providing core technical support for China's strategic mineral resource security.

Paper link:

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/15/9/945

Minerals Editor's Choice Articles section:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/minerals/editors_choice