scholarly journals Evaluating the Feasibility of Illegal Open-Pit Mining Identification Using Insar Coherence

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shunyao Wang ◽  
Xiaoping Lu ◽  
Zhenwei Chen ◽  
Guo Zhang ◽  
Taofeng Ma ◽  
...  

Illegal open-pit mining causes environmental harm and undermines sustainable development. Conventional monitoring approaches such as field research and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery are time-consuming and labor-intensive, making large-scale monitoring difficult. In comparison, optical remote sensing imagery can cover large areas but is vulnerable to adverse weather conditions and is not sensitive to vertical ground changes. As open-pit excavation causes sudden changes in the scattering properties of ground objects along with dramatic vertical deformation, we evaluated the feasibility of using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) coherence to identify illegal mining activities. Our method extracts the coherence coefficient from two SAR images taken on different dates, applies thresholding and filtering to extract a decorrelation map, and then overlays this with legal mining boundaries and optical satellite images to identify illegal mining activities. For three test cases in southwestern Inner Mongolia, China, 49 legal mining sites were correctly detected (with an accuracy of 90.74%) as well as six illegal mining sites. Ground truthing confirmed the presence of ongoing activity at one of these sites. Our study shows that InSAR coherence is suitable for the identification of mining activities, and our method provides a new approach for the detection and monitoring of illegal open-pit mining.

Author(s):  
T. V. Galanina ◽  
M. I. Baumgarten ◽  
T. G. Koroleva

Large-scale mining disturbs wide areas of land. The development program for the mining industry, with an expected considerable increase in production output, aggravates the problem with even vaster territories exposed to the adverse anthropogenic impact. Recovery of mining-induced ecosystems in the mineral-extracting regions becomes the top priority objective. There are many restoration mechanisms, and they should be used in integration and be highly technologically intensive as the environmental impact is many-sided. This involves pollution of water, generation of much waste and soil disturbance which is the most typical of open pit mining. Scale disturbance of land, withdrawal of farming land, land pollution and littering are critical problems to the solved in the first place. One of the way outs is highquality reclamation. This article reviews the effective rules and regulations on reclamation. The mechanism is proposed for the legal control of disturbed land reclamation on a regional and federal level. Highly technologically intensive recovery of mining-induced landscape will be backed up by the natural environment restoration strategy proposed in the Disturbed Land Reclamation Concept.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 109-118
Author(s):  
Lei Zhao ◽  
Greg You

Brown coal is young, shallowly deposited, and widely distributed in the world. It is a fuel commonly used to generate electricity. This paper first reviews the resources and characteristics of brown coal in Victoria, Australia, and its exploitation and contribution to the economy or power supply in Victoria. Due to the shallow depth of the brown coal seam, e.g. very favorable stripping ratio, open pit mining is the only mining method used to extract the coal at low cost for power generators. With the large-scale mining operations, cases of batter failure were not rare in the area. From the comprehensive review of past failures, overburden batter tends to fail by circular sliding, coal batter tends to fail by block sliding after the overburden is stripped due to a weak water-bearing layer underneath the coal seam and tension cracks developed at the rear of the batter, and batter failure is typically coincided with peak raining seasons. Secondly, the paper reviews the case study of Maddingley Brown Coal (MBC) Open Cut Mine batter stability, including geology, hydrogeology, and hydro-mechanically coupled numerical modelling. The modelling employs three-dimensional finite element method to simulate the MBC northern batter where cracks were observed in November 2013. The comprehensive simulation covers an overburden batter, a brown coal batter, two rainfall models, and a buttressed batter. The simulated results agree well with observed data, and it is found that the rainfall at the intensity of 21mm substantially lowered the factor of safety of the coal batter.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziheng Song ◽  
Yinli Bi ◽  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Yunli Gong ◽  
Huihui Yang

Abstract It is urgent to restore the ecological function in open-pit mining areas on grassland in Eastern China. The open-pit mines have abundant of mining associated clay, which is desirable for using as a soil source for ecological restoration. The mining associated clay in Hulunbuir district, Inner Mongolia was selected and mixed with a sandy soil at a ratio of 1:1 (S_C soil). Also, effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) inoculation on soil functions were studied. The aboveground and underground biomass of maize in S_C soil was 1.49 and 2.41 times higher than that of clay soil, respectively. In the topsoil and S_C soil, the growth hormone (IAA) and cytokinin (CTK) levels of maize were higher than that of clay, while abscission acid (ABA) levels were lower. The inoculation with AMF could significantly improve the biomass of maize and enhance the stress resistance of plants. Through structural equation model (SEM) analyses, it was found that the soil type and AMF inoculation had the most direct impact on maize growth and biomass content. These finds extend our knowledge regarding a low-cost method for physical and biological improvement of mining associated clay, and to provide theoretical support for large-scale application in the future.


Author(s):  
Nikita O. Kapustin ◽  
Dmitry A. Grushevenko

Unconventional oils have taken the global oil industry by storm and have secured an 8% share in the global liquid fuels production in under 20 years. And it is without a doubt that these resources will continue to play an important role in the future. Cost analysis of unconventional oil types has shown that Light Tight Oil (LTO) or shale oil still holds potential for technological and economical improvement, however, the revolutionary stage in development has probably already been passed in the US. For the rest of the world, the issue of kick starting LTO production lies as much in the fields of adapting the existing technologies, as overcoming economic, legislative and environmental barriers. The same cannot be said for heavy oil and bitumen production, as open pit mining is demonstrating cost escalation and resource base depletion, whilein situproduction approach has reached the limit of technological progress and production costs are mostly determined by external factors. Oil price fluctuation and the emergence of more economically viable unconventional oil sources have shifted attention away from kerogen oil and substantially halted production technologies development. The forecast of unconventional oil was conducted along two scenarios: Baseline (a business-as-usual scenario) and Technological (scenario of forced technology development and transfer). The share of unconventional oil in global crude production will increase to 17–21%, depending on scenario. The main difference between scenarios is the rate of kerogen production, which benefits from the favorable conditions of the Technological scenario. Large-scale LTO production will remain a local North American phenomenon in both scenarios. More important than geological or technological factors is the unique business environment, characteristic for the USA, which would be impossible to replicate in any other country. Expansion of unconventional oil production as stimulated competition on the liquid fuels market. Conventional oil producers have mostly adapted to the new environment and will continue to dominate in the forecast period. The greatest pressure is put on the more costly alternative supply sources: biofuels, coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid; which have the least promising prospects in the current market.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlene Harter ◽  
Tom Schipper ◽  
Lukasz Zwirello ◽  
Andreas Ziroff ◽  
Thomas Zwick

The benefit of trolley truck systems is the substitution of the diesel fuel by the cheaper and more ecological electrical energy. Trolley trucks are powered by electricity from two overhead contact lines, where one is the supply and the other the return conductor. Such trolley trucks are used for haulage at open pit mining sites but could also be used for freight traffic at roadways in the future. Automatic guidance prevents the trolley-powered trucks from leaving the track and thus allows higher operating speeds, higher loading capacity, and greater efficiency. Radar is the ideal sensing technique for automatic guidance in such environments. The presented radar system with two-dimensional digital beamforming capability offers a compact measurement solution as it can be installed on top of the truck. Besides the distance measurement, this radar system allows to detect the location and inclination of the overhead contact lines by digital beamforming in two dimensions. Besides automatic guidance, the knowledge of the inclination of the overhead contact lines could allow automatic speed adaption, which would help to achieve maximum speed especially in hilly terrain.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jihyun Moon ◽  
Heejeong Seo ◽  
Hoonyol Lee

<p>Musan mine in North Korea is the largest open-pit iron mine in Asia with the proved reserves of about 2.06 billion tons and more than 9 square kilometers. Open-pit mining is one of the surface mining technique extracting minerals from the surface. Vegetation is rarely distributed at the mining site because the topsoil is removed and the ore is mined directly from the surface. Therefore, it is effective to observe surface displacement at the mining site using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology. InSAR coherence detects random surface change that measures the activity or stability of the interferometric phase of InSAR data. High coherence will be maintained on the surface where there is no movement and only surface scattering. On the other hand, the surface where there is a lot of movement and volumetric scattering has low coherence value. Therefore, using 12-days InSAR coherence images from Sentinel-1 satellites, for example, it is possible to analyze how active the open-pit mine is during the 12 days. Sentinel-1A satellite images were acquired from June 11, 2015 to May 24, 2016, followed by Sentine-1B satellite images from September 27, 2016 to April 21, 2019. A total of 102 SAR images were downloaded from European Space Agency (ESA) portal. There is a gap between May 24 and September 27, 2016 due to the transition of the data acquisition plan. Over 100 12-days coherence data were obtained by applying InSAR. Stable spots and target spots were selected through average and standard deviation of the entire coherence time series data. Coherence values include not only the mining activity but also the effects of perpendicular baseline, temporal baseline, and weather. Therefore, NDAI (Normalized Difference Activity Index) was newly defined to remove the noise and only the coherence value due to the influence of the mining activity was extracted. The degree of activities can be observed by the time series coherence and NDAI images. This study needs other references related to mining activities in order to analyze the mining activities in more detail. This method can be applied to other open-pit mine.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Tandidatu Deny ◽  
◽  
Sundek Hariyadi ◽  

The stability of slope, both on the slope of work and the final slope, is a very important aspect of slope stability, both on the slope of work and the final slope in open pit mining activities. The inconsistency of the slopes will result in the collapse of rocks around the excavation site. This happens because the condition of the rock when it has not been excavated is generally balanced. However, due to the discontinuous patterns that occur other than naturally and also due to the mining activities such as excavation, blasting and others, cause a reduction in the retaining force of the rock on the slope results in the equilibrium of the force tends to shift and is not balanced. Study of the stability of the open pit highwall slope at PIT 22 GN PT Kitadin Site Embalut, Kutai Kartanegara Regency, East Kalimantan Province was carried out with the aim to know the rock characteristics, to calculate slope geometry stable safety factors, and to recognize the type of landslide using a bishop method. The results of the modeling consist of several heights and slopes, as well as angles that is formed. Section AA’ has a safety factor value of 1.387, section BB has a safety factor of 1.482, section BB' has a safety factor value of 1.390, section DD' has a safety factor value of 1.318, section EE has a safety factor value of 2,381, section FF' has a safety factor value of 2.426, section GG' has a safety factor value of 2.424, section HH 'has a safety factor value of 2.339.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Schröder ◽  
Kim Bürgl ◽  
Yves Annanias ◽  
Andreas Niekler ◽  
Lydia Müller ◽  
...  

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