Satellite tv for pc imagery of the 13 February 2024 landslide at Çöpler Mine
The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who’s widely known as a world chief within the examine and administration of landslides.
On Friday, the primary set of satellite tv for pc pictures grew to become obtainable of the 13 February 2024 landslide at Çöpler Mine in Turkey. This was a very good radar image released by Capella Space and circulated via social media, including Twitter:-
This picture generated some reasonably bizarre social media exercise, with one poster claiming that this was not a landslide, which was unusual.
That is the picture in its full type, courtesy of Capella Area:-
Observe that the boundaries of the landslide are highlighted within the picture above.
On Twitter, Tolga Gorum correctly identified that the image shows that the landslide moved in two directions, with the bulk shifting into the valley, however a portion shifting into the principle pit:-
I feel that is right, however my interpretation is {that a} higher portion entered the pit than is proven right here. Particularly, I feel that the supply space of the failure in direction of the west in all probability prolonged additional to the north, with the particles cascading down the benches within the pit wall.
It is a Google Earth picture of in regards to the space of the failure, collected in November 2021:-
The shadows play a trick in your thoughts right here, and it’s straightforward to interpret the topography in reverse. However the massive stack of the leach heap that failed might be seen.
Under is a really tough and prepared comparability between the Google Earth picture and the radar picture – these should be correctly orthorectified to be helpful, however it offers the final sense of the landslide.
The seek for the stays of the lacking workers proceed. It is estimated that 35 million cubic metres of waste will need to be moved, equating to 400,000 truck masses (I assume that that is predicated on utilizing the very massive mining dump vehicles, because the quantity is just too low for regular vehicles). Observe that the quantity of the landslide is reasonably bigger than earlier estimates.
In different information, the permits to function the mine have now been terminated – it will likely be attention-grabbing to see how this performs out within the coming months. Moreover, Cengiz Demirci, the in-country senior vice chairman of operations at SSR Mining (which is Anagold’s guardian firm) was arrested on Sunday morning. Six different staff of the mine have additionally been arrested. The accusation seems to be that they ignored indicators of motion within the leach heap previous to the failure.
The set off of the failure stays unclear, if certainly there was one. There are recommendations that blasting could have been an element, however this may not be regular in a leach heap.
The last word price of this landslide is more likely to be many multiples of the cash saved on mining operations by means of insufficient development and/or operation of the leach heap.