| Survey & investigation
of the TSF needs to be continuously monitored, enabling the instant discovery of any faults and human error. The raw data collected from many different types of ground and remote sensors need to be fused, analysed, and interpreted into useful insight. Therefore, the enormity of this task may be feasible only with the promise of various ML tools at its core.
Critical role
On one end of the spectrum, government, community, NGOs, and investor stakeholders do not have access to TSF geotechnical data like the mining companies. However, the generation of a rigorous geotechnical model is resource intensive and contains uncertainties related to assumptions of the model parameters. Medium resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data is available globally and open source from various space agencies. There are also commercial alternatives, which are often at higher resolution but are not globally available and are expensive to access. These advantages and limitations of the monitoring and modelling technologies are like a puzzle that requires research on how to fit them together.
Space and satellite technologies have a critical
role to play in addressing some of the most pressing issues of today, here on earth, including addressing the climate emergency, ensuring food security and metal resources. I like to think of satellites and Earth Observation EO as ‘macro- scopes’ floating around the earth. Just like the way microscopes have given us insight into the world on the tiny, ‘micro’-scale and helped solve many diseases, EO macro-scopes are helping our understanding on the larger scale. Satellites were one of the first instruments that helped quantify and bring attention to the changing climate -which was recently recognised with Antarctic glaciers being named after satellites.
References
1) InSAR and numerical modelling for tailings dam monitoring – the Cadia failure case study by Maral Bayaraa, Brian Sheil, and Cristian Rossi. Géotechnique September 2022.
www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/abs/10.1680/jgeot.21.00399
2) Construction with digital twin information systems by Rafael Sacks, Ioannis Brilakis, Ergo Pikas, Haiyan Sally Xie and Mark Girolami. 27 November 2020
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-centric-engineering/article/construction- with-digital-twin-information-systems/C88A0AE68BBA09517D7534B9DBE24FEF
Above left: Satellite InSAR over Australia’s Cadia TSF which failed in 2018.
Above middle: Temporal view of Anomaly – if outside the confidence envelope.
Above right: Spatial distribution of anomalous measurements identified from novel AI approach
Author information
Maral Bayaraa is a DPhil researcher at the University of Oxford and a senior Earth Observation Consultant at the Satellite Applications Catapult, the UK government’s innovation and technology hub. Her DPhil research has been awarded an Industrial Fellowship from the 1851 Royal Commission and an award at COP28 from the Prototypes for Humanity.
Maral says she is looking for research and industry collaboration: Collaboration and Data - A mine or a construction company - I would love to work with you. My research can help make the most out of your data and your data can help make sure our data and algorithms are working well. Create pilots and case studies together. Investment - My PhD research has only scratched the tip of the iceberg. So we need investments to make this global monitoring a reality. Communication - Poets and artists. We need help to communicate our science with current and future generations.
To get in touch, connect via her website:
https://maral.space/ or LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maralbayaraa/
www.waterpowermagazine.com | June 2024 | 33
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