Rare earth elements include 17 metals, including cerium, neodymium, lanthanum, europium, dysprosium, and yttrium. We find them in many devices, like smartphones, electric vehicles, guided missiles, MRI machines, and wind turbines.
The name "rare-earth" makes it sound exotic, but most of those elements are fairly common in Earth's crust. It's never been hard to find them, but the challenge is to separate and refine them.
Our journey with rare-earth metals begins in 1787, in a quarry near Ytterby, Sweden, where Lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius discovered a dark mineral.
Chemist Johan Gadolin analyzed the sample in 1794 and identified a new oxide, yttria, a discovery that opened the door to decades of chemical breakthroughs. In 1803, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Wilhelm Hisinger, and Martin Klaproth identified cerium from another mineral. Between 1839 and 1843, Carl Gustaf Mosander separated lanthanum, erbium, and terbium from mixtures earlier scientists thought were single elements. Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran isolated samarium in 1879. Georges Urbain split yttria into ytterbium and lutetium in 1907. Promethium, the final naturally occurring member of our band, was discovered in 1945 by Jacob A. Marinsky and colleagues during nuclear fission research.
The first major commercial application arrived in 1885, when Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle using thorium and cerium oxides.
He recognized that the rare earth elements' incandescent properties might be useful. (“Incandescence” describes the glow of visible light given off when a material is heated.) Welsbach developed a gas mantle (lamp) using an incandescent material that produced a bright light and could be mass-produced. By 1935, more than five billion mantles had been produced, but this invention posed problems: the lamps were hard to light, and the piles of rare earth waste left over after production were prone to catching fire. Welsbach found a way to alloy, or mix, these rare earth wastes with iron, creating a “flint stone” that sparked when struck, which he named ferrocerium. This material was widely used in cigarette lighters and ignition devices in automobiles. The ore supplying these rare earth elements came largely from Brazil, India, and North Carolina, thereby creating the first international trade in rare earth elements.
Those mantles glowed brightly, creating strong demand for rare-earth ores. Soon after, mischmetal alloys appeared in lighter flints. By the 1960s, europium enabled vivid red phosphors in color televisions. Later, neodymium magnets transformed electric motors and generators by offering stronger magnetic fields in smaller packages.
Dysprosium improved the heat resistance of high-performance magnets used in turbines and defense systems.
Electric vehicles require far more mineral inputs than gas-powered cars, which further drives demand.
Author's Warning: mispronouncing these rare-earth metals several times might be a conduit for summoning things that go bump in the night.
Rare-earth deposits are widespread, yet production is concentrated in a few regions. China holds around 44 million metric tons of reserves, nearly half of the known global totals.
In the middle of the Mojave Desert, just off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, sits the Mountain Pass mine. Surrounded by a high plateau of pale rock and desert scrub, this 600-foot-deep open pit hums with activity. Trucks haul blasted rock to the surface, where it is crushed in pursuit of valuable minerals that are scattered thinly through the earth’s crust yet remain indispensable to modern life.
Buried within the rocks of Mountain Pass are rare-earth elements—a group of metals that play a vital role in nearly every twenty-first-century technology. They help make the high-strength magnets that power electric vehicle motors, the phosphors that light up television screens, the guidance systems inside precision missiles, and the tiny speakers and vibration motors in smartphones. The elements have become so critical that the U.S. government now calls them “essential for national security and economic resilience.”
Brazil follows with roughly 21 million metric tons; India maintains about 6.9 million metric tons; Australia has around 5.7 million metric tons; Russia controls about 3.8 million metric tons; and Vietnam holds close to 3.5 million metric tons.
Major ore types include bastnasite, monazite, and xenotime. Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia remains one of the largest producing sites on earth.
China currently mines about 70% of the global rare-earth supply and controls nearly 90% of refining capacity.
China sits at the center of this emerging global supply chain. Over the past four decades, it has built an industrial ecosystem that dominates every step of rare-earth production, from mining and chemical separation to metal refining and magnet manufacturing. It now produces nearly all the world’s high-performance rare-earth magnets.
That dominance didn’t happen by accident. Beginning in the 1980s, Chinese leaders saw a strategic opportunity. In 1992, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping famously declared that “the Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.” His government backed the sector with cheap loans, loose environmental rules, and direct investment, driving costs so low that foreign competitors often could not survive. While firms elsewhere closed mines and shuttered processing plants, China’s rare-earth industry scaled up as it developed expertise across the entire mine-to-magnet supply chain.
Refining is more important than raw ore because separation facilities produce the oxides and metals needed for magnets and advanced electronics. That concentration gives Beijing substantial leverage in global technology supply chains.
That said, old Uncle Sam is mining again. Mountain Pass, in California’s Mojave Desert and operated by MP Materials, opened in 1952, once dominated global production, closed in 2002, and reopened in 2017. It now produces tens of thousands of metric tons annually and accounts for over 10% of global mined output (pdf). Some processing happens onsite, but most refining is done overseas.
Additional projects are advancing. USA Rare Earth LLC, alongside Texas Mineral Resources Corp, is developing the Round Top project in Texas and expanding rare-earth processing tied to its existing uranium operations. Rare Element Resources advances the Bear Lodge project in Wyoming.
Combined, these efforts aim to expand domestic processing and reduce dependence on foreign refining.
Demand continues to go up across the defense, aerospace, electronics, and renewable energy sectors. The U.S. holds reserves and operates active mines. Whether expanded refining capacity arrives in time to meet strategic needs isn't yet known. Control of rare-earth supply now shapes economic strength and national security in ways few predicted when a Swedish quarry first yielded a curious-looking black rock.
Rare earth elements moved from laboratory curiosities to the backbone of modern industry. Control over mining, and especially refining, influences everything from smartphones to missile systems.
Just be careful when pronouncing their names.
