Editorial for special issue “Using geophysical inversion for mineral exploration methods and applications”

Today, minerals are playing a critical role in the transition from fossil fuel-based energy systems to renewable and sustainable energy sources (Owen et al., 2023) [1]. Several critical minerals, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements (REEs), and graphite, among others, are essential both economically and technologically, but their supply chains are vulnerable to disruption. More traditional resources, like copper and zinc, are also irreplaceable in advanced material engineering for energy generation, storage, and transmission applications. Advanced geoscientific technologies are needed to exploit these diverse minerals to meet the industrial demand. Geophysics can contribute to the efficient and effective search for mineral deposits, especially when the targets are scattered over a large area or buried deeply underground (Dentith et al., 2018; Wei et al., 2023) [2,3].