The estimation capability of potential mining and quarry areas from seismic catalog using statistical analysis, an application to Turkey

Abstract

The problem of identifying quarry-mining blasts has become an important one given the improvement of the location capability of the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, National Earthquake Monitoring Center (KOERI-NEMC) seismic network, an increasing number of smaller events is currently listed in the seismic catalogue is contaminated by industrial explosions that occur in quarry, coal, gold and boron mines. We performed a time of day analysis with respect to location by investigating daytime events versus nighttime events as a function of geographic location. In this study, the temporal variation of over 22.948 events (Md ≤ 3.0) were analyzed occurring in Turkey for the period of 2000 to 2009 using KOERI-NEMC seismic catalog to identify areas where there may be explosion contamination. We present an algorithm to identify and mark mining and quarry blasts from seismic catalogs that is a well-established, a variable percentage of events could be removed by this screening. We have the location of 57 major potential quarries and mines active in the years 2000-2009 that has been detected in the study. The locations of them from 11.151 overlapping blocks, 10 x 10 km in size, have been estimated from KOERI-NEMC seismic catalog. There are a total of 22.948 events evaluated in the study, of which 3754 should statistically represent possible blasts, or 16% of the total volume of the data. In order to test of the estimated coordinates from the analysis, that was searched with the satellite images of the mining and quarry areas taken from the Google Earth program (http://earth.google.com/intl/en_uk/). In general, a good correlation between the estimated locations from this study and satellite locations may be noticed suggest that the daytime to nighttime ratio analysis can provide valuable information about the potential quarry and mining areas. That is a meaningful analysis for network operators interested in tectonic studies that, because it highlights areas where need to pay careful attention is advisable. Key words: Earthquakes, quarry-mine blasts, seismic monitoring, discrimination.