Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 83 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 748 Mineral resource ownership Global Resources This is a gas well on the Crow Nation American Indian reservation in Montana. However the government and not the tribe possesses mineral rights because the land is divided between aboveground and belowground ownership a common process in the American West. Reuters Landov have subdivided fee ownership into smaller tracts as well as separating severing surface ownership from mineral ownership. It is also common to find private surface ownership overlying government-owned mineral ownership. The reverse is rare. Sometimes the government-owned minerals in areas of extensive mining activity have been inadvertently extracted because of confusion as to the rightful owner. Mineral ownership can be nebulous and is not as closely defined and monitored in some situations as is surface ownership. As a result even basic property tax obligations may be ignored through misunderstandings so that mineral property is often orphaned by rightful owners and can be secured by more knowledgeable individuals by paying the taxes due or other wise convincing the local property assessor that they are in possession of the mineral ownership. The folklore of mineral property ownership is filled with stories of the incidental property transfer that leads to vast wealth for the acquirer through subsequent mineral extraction. Although surface property has been known to escalate to hundreds or even thousands of times its initial value mineral ownership can result in a million or more times its original value through proceeds from minerals extraction. Yet the management of mineral ownership is often not of primar y importance to the individual because its value is frequently misunderstood. Surface Versus Mineral Ownership Much of the individually owned minerals in the United States have resulted from original . government patents and land grants to institutions and private entities. Originally most landownership concerned land in its entirety this .
