“If the commodity market had been different, they would have opened that mine,” said Jessica Smith, a professor in the engineering design and society department at the Colorado School of Mines who has written about Mt. Emmons. “It was really the market that [killed] that project, not the opposition.”

Sinkholes are fairly common, due to collapsed caves, old mines or dissolving material, but the circumstances in South Dakota stand out, said Paul Santi, a professor of geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

Community Benefit Agreements are needed to integrate community priorities into project design and mining operations on public land in the USA, argues Elizabeth Holley.

“We knew that a requirement for any successful proposal was going to be to have a location where companies could get together, advance their technologies, share resources,” said Paul C. Johnson, president of the School of Mines. “That’s where we jumped in and said, ‘how about if we do that for you to make your proposal more competitive?’ They got very excited about it.”

Colorado School of Mines purchased the industrial property a month ago for about $14 million, university President Paul Johnson told the Denver Business Journal.

Gabriel Collins, Ian Lange and Morgan Bazilian, of the Payne Institute for Public Policy, co-authored a piece on the opportunity available in the United States related to critical minerals.

A softening labor market is raising concerns for college students who will soon be looking for a job. But on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden, companies are practically fighting over future employees.

"You see that the political tides are in your favor as a mining person in the United States," said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute and professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines.

Even the August heat and the long trek up Lookout Mountain Road wasn’t going to stop about 1,700 college students from leaving their mark on their new university.