Microseismic events for slope stability analysis — a case study at an open pit mine

Abstract

Slope instability is one of the major concerns in open pit mining. A significant collapse of the pit wall can result in injuries or fatalities, damage to mining equipment, interruptions to production, and potential loss of reserves. Properly interpreted microseismic data can be used to augment surface monitoring systems in identifying potential instability and the associated failure mode. A challenge for this microseismic application is that many seismic events associated with slope movements are weak and they hardly trigger a microseismic monitoring system that is set up to record an event in a trigger mode. A research project carried out at an open pit mine in Australia used both trigger mode and continuous mode to record microseismic events. The preliminary results have shown that the weak events are equally important as the strong seismic events for slope stability assessment, and they should not be ignored in microseismic monitoring for open pit mining.