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Preliminary Evaluation of In-mining GPR Surveys for the Identification of Karst Anomalies in a Gypsum Quarry
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, Near Surface Geoscience 2016 - First Conference on Geophysics for Mineral Exploration and Mining, Sep 2016, Volume 2016, p.1 - 5
Abstract
The karst phenomenon is, particularly in soluble rocks environments, a widespread problem. Rock dissolution is a progressively increasing phenomenon since voids tends to expand once it started generating relevant cavities inside the rock mass. The possibility to identify in advance, i.e. since their early formation stage, this kind of inhomogeneities within the mining environment may be, therefore, important to improve both workers safety and environmental sustainability. GPR technical features, and in particular its high resolution, make this technique potentially very useful in this respect. Within this work both real example tests in a Gypsum quarry in the Monferrato area (North-West Italy) and numerical simulations of GPR signal propagation have been performed to better understand the potentiality of the method in identifying thin voids within the exploited material. Moreover potential evaluation of the void’s filling from the GPR response has been also attempted.