Seismic and Aseismic Tools for Mine Safety

<jats:p>The energy transition will require more critical minerals, with many of these mineral deposits being located deep underground posing significant safety and technological challenges. Underground mining operations generally encounter adverse stress conditions, the resulting response can be seismic events occurring either very soon, or after sustained perturbation of the in-situ stress over several years. It has been recognized that closely monitoring and characterizing seismic response is non-negotiable for underground safety and therefore plays a key role in the operational success of a mine. With increasing depth, seismic hazard increases as larger magnitude events become more common, potentially leading to damaging rockbursts. As such, seismic monitoring systems have been installed at mines globally over the past several decades to help mine operators locate and understand rock failure induced by excavation. Appropriately designed and optimized seismic arrays enable well-constrained event locations and hence provide greater confidence in calculated source parameters and greater accuracy in advanced seismic analysis methods such as tomographic imaging, source mechanism analysis, stress inversion and strain rate. The results of these analyses can then be evaluated in relation to known structures and excavations. The integration of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) fibre-optic monitoring with conventional seismic sensors has the potential to innovate the capture of both brittle anelastic and aseismic creep rock mass response. The integration and interpretation of different seismic parameters and methods are helping to improve short- and long-term seismic hazard assessment and to identify regions of high and low concern.</jats:p>