Agent 01
Subsurface models
Block models built from the drilling that already exists — desurveyed by minimum curvature, gridded, and re-run the moment new assays land.
Context-aware, geospatially aware agents for mineral exploration.
We are building the next generation of intelligent digital agents — a virtual data science team for mineral exploration. They understand geological context and the spatial relationships in your own data, so your geologists move faster and get through far more of it.
The problem
Eighteen major copper discoveries in 1997. Fewer than five a year through the 2010s. Four across 2019–23 combined. Over the same window demand runs from 28 Mt to 42 Mt while production peaks in 2030 and rolls over — a shortfall near 10 Mt by 2040.
Major copper discoveries
≥ 500 kt contained Cu · S&P Global census, 1990–2023
Same census, harder framing: only 14 of 239 deposits date from the last decade — 46.2 Mt, or 3.5% of the 1.315 Bt total.
Refined copper, Mt per year
S&P Global · Copper in the Age of AI, January 2026
Production peaks at 33 Mt in 2030 and declines. Absent significant change the 2040 deficit reaches 10 Mt — about 25% below projected demand.
Source: S&P Global Commodity Insights.
There is no published per-year discovery count for 2024 or 2025 — the S&P census window ends at 2023, so the bars stop there. We do not state or imply a figure for those years.
Are we running out of minerals?
Not yet.
The deposits at surface are already found. What is left is under cover — and finding it comes down to how well a company can see what it already knows.
The technology
A company's knowledge is not a pile of documents. It is a volume. Retrieval that flattens it into text throws away the one thing exploration runs on — where everything is in relation to everything else. Aethermine keeps that intact and hands it to the model.
Survey products processed and put in context of everything else on the property, without a specialist software seat.
Geostatistical targeting across the whole land package, weighting geophysics, geochemistry and structure against what the district has already produced — a model output, ranked, never a resource estimate.
3D modelling work prepared in-house against the company's own drilling and geology, and re-run the moment new assays land.
Standards, blanks, duplicates and survey geometry flagged for review — the same checks, run on arrival instead of at year end.
structural interpretation from magnetics
Aethermine flags and prepares. It does not verify, certify or sign anything — a Qualified Person does that, on evidence the platform makes easier to find.
What changes
How exploration works today
Specialist software, and someone trained on it The survey lands, then waits for a seat and a schedule.
Outside consultants Scoped, quoted, queued — and the context leaves the building with it.
Days to weeks Errors surface long after the rig has moved on.
What Aethermine changes
Agents run the same technical work end to end, on data already connected. New surveys land processed instead of shelved.
The same procedure, the same thresholds, every time it runs. Findings carry their rule, their threshold and their evidence.
Every task sees the rest of what the company knows — spatially, not just textually. Read-only connectors. Nothing migrated. Answers cite their source.
01 The pipeline
A company already knows almost everything it needs to know. It is spread across drill logs, assay tables, maps, geophysical surveys and decades of reports — and the moment that material is flattened into text, the thing that made it useful is gone: where it is, how deep, how far from what. Aethermine keeps the spatial relationships intact, hands that structure to frontier models, and puts agents on top to complete the specialist work.
Illustrative animation — synthetic data, not a client dataset
Agent 01
Block models built from the drilling that already exists — desurveyed by minimum curvature, gridded, and re-run the moment new assays land.
Agent 02
Geostatistical surfaces over the whole land package, weighting geophysics, geochemistry and structure against what the district has already produced.
Agent 03
Standards, blanks, duplicates and interval geometry checked continuously against your thresholds. Exceedances are flagged with the evidence attached.
Read-only connectors. Nothing migrated, nothing moved. Every answer cites where it came from — file, sheet, row, page.
Field notes
Working notes on retrieval, geoscience data and what actually breaks in an exploration archive.
Geologists and machine-learning researchers spent forty years inventing the same equations without noticing. The useful part is what it implies: if the mathematics has been settled since the 1960s, the reason a prospectivity map still takes weeks is not the mathematics.
Read the post →Contact
Bring one property and whatever state its data is in. We will connect it read-only and run the work in front of you — nothing migrated, nothing written back.