Mining-Induced Time-Series Deformation Investigation Based on SBAS-InSAR Technique: A Case Study of Drilling Water Solution Rock Salt Mine

Abstract

Compared to traditional coal mines, the mining-induced dynamic deformation of drilling solution mining activities may result in even more serious damage to surface buildings and infrastructures due to the different exploitation mode. Therefore, long-term dynamic monitoring and analysis of rock salt mines is extremely important for preventing potential geological damages. In this work, the small baseline subset Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SBAS-InSAR) technique with Sentinel−1A imagery is utilized to monitor the ground surface deformation of a rock salt mining area. The time-series analysis is carried out to obtain the spatial-temporal characteristics of land subsidence caused by drilling solution mining activities. A typical rock salt mine in Changde, China is selected as the test site. Twenty-four scenes of Sentinel−1A image data acquired from June 2015 to January 2017 are used to obtain the time-series subsidence of the test mine. The temporal-spatial evolution of the derived settlement funnels is revealed. The time-series deformation on typical feature points has been analyzed. Experimental results show that the obtained drilling solution mining-induced subsidence has a spatial characteristic of multiplied peaks along the transversal direction. Temporally, the large-scale surface settlement for the rock salt mine area begins to appear in September 2016, with a time lag of 8 months, and shows an obvious seasonal fluctuation. The maximum cumulative subsidence is detected up to 199 mm. These subsiding characteristics are consistent with the connected groove mining method used in drilling water solution mines. To evaluate the reliability of the results, the SBAS-derived results are compared with the field-leveling measurements. The estimated root mean square error (RMSE) of ±11 mm indicates a high consistency.

InSAR Signal and Data Processing

“…The third paper [ 3 ], “Multibaseline Interferometric Phase Denoising Based on Kurtosis in the NSST Domain”, and the fourth article [ 4 ], “Extended Phase Unwrapping Max-Flow/Min-Cut Algorithm for Multibaseline SAR Interferograms Using a Two-Stage Programming Approach”, focus on phase denoising and phase unwrapping techniques of multibaseline InSAR, respectively. The fifth paper [ 5 ], “Mining-Induced Time-Series Deformation Investigation Based on SBAS-InSAR Technique: A Case Study of Drilling Water Solution Rock Salt Mine”, shows an InSAR case study concerning salt extraction based on solution mining. The study applies the SBAS-InSAR technique to obtain the spatial–temporal characteristics of the ground subsidence caused by solution mining activities.…”

Surface Deformation Monitoring and Risk Mapping in the Surroundings of the Solotvyno Salt Mine (Ukraine) between 1992 and 2021

“…These are excellent tools to monitor remote locations that are not accessible, lack preliminarily installed geodetic networks or ground control points (GCP), or are simply too big to perform onsite measurement campaigns. The interferometric monitoring of the surface subsidence of salt mines was the state-of-the-art technique applied in this study [15,19,20].…”

Monitoring and Analysis of Ground Surface Settlement in Mining Clusters by SBAS-InSAR Technology

“…Although it can obtain the change in the time series of subsidence, it has significant shortcomings: (1) the monitoring accuracy is affected by the quality of the GNSS receiver equipment [ 6 ]; (2) the reasonableness of the deployment of the GNSS points affects the accuracy of the deformation monitoring results [ 7 ]; (3) GNSS can only monitor single-point deformation information and so cannot accurately obtain polygon deformation data, while a study with a regional scope requires multi-point spatial decomposition to obtain regional results [ 7 ]; and (4) the traditional technique requires considerable human and material resources and has low spatial and temporal resolutions. Therefore, it is particularly ineffective when used for large-scale and long-time monitoring of a mining area, and it cannot capture all settlement changes in the mining area [ 8 ].…”