Abstract
Catastrophic failure of a tailings dam at an iron ore mine complex in Brumadinho, Brazil, on 25th January 2019 released 11.7 million m3 of tailings downstream. Although reportedly monitored using an array of geotechnical techniques, the collapse occurred without any apparent warning. It claimed more than 200 lives and caused considerable environmental damage. Here we present the Intermittent Small Baseline Subset (ISBAS) technique on satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data to assess the course of events. We find that parts of the dam wall and tailings were experiencing deformation not consistent with consolidation settlement preceding the collapse. Furthermore, we show that the timing of the dam collapse would have been foreseeable based on this observed precursory deformation. We conclude that satellite-based monitoring techniques may help mitigate similar catastrophes in the future.
Highlights
Catastrophic failure of a tailings dam at an iron ore mine complex in Brumadinho, Brazil, on 25th January 2019 released 11.7 million m3 of tailings downstream
With direct access to the monitoring data not readily available, we studied ground surface displacements over Dam I in the 17 months preceding the collapse using satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)
The ability to effectively detect precursory accelerating displacements in these cases could have been limited by a lack of measurements and degraded accuracy over the vegetated dam surface, as is common for many conventional InSAR techniques owing to poor coherence[11,12]
Summary
Catastrophic failure of a tailings dam at an iron ore mine complex in Brumadinho, Brazil, on 25th January 2019 released 11.7 million m3 of tailings downstream. Data from both tracks indicate widespread ground surface displacements across the dry, vegetated tailings beach behind the dam wall for the period 2017–2019 (Fig. 1); this deformation is not adequately detected using a conventional Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) approach (Supplementary Fig. 2), which provides only 3.3% coverage of the entire dam structure compared with 99.5% using ISBAS.
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