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Preliminary Results of Resistivity Surveys to Map the Base of a Wet Tailings Pond at Golgohar Iron Ore Mine
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, 5th Asia Pacific Meeting on Near Surface Geoscience & Engineering, Mar 2023, Volume 2023, p.1 - 5
Abstract
Tailings ponds at Golgohar iron ore mine were created by excavating large areas and using the excavated soil to construct the walls of the ponds. Since the depth to the base of tailings ponds was not measured after construction, we used electrical resistivity measurements to determine the thickness of tailings in the northern-most tailings pond. A few boreholes were also drilled in the study area, but we cannot access their information before concluding the resistivity interpretations. We measured nine Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) profiles using the Wenner-Schlumberger configuration with the unit electrode spacing a=8m. Two Vertical Electrical Soundings (VES) were also measured based on the request of the client. The results obtained by the time of submitting this paper show that the tailings pond is about 28–30m deep at the sides and it becomes deeper than 35m in the central part. The fine-grained tailings mainly contain high moisture content which results in resistivity values smaller than 4Ωm. To minimize the interpretation ambiguities, laboratory measurements were also performed on four samples taken from the study site. The laboratory results confirmed resistivity values of the tailings with maximum values of about 14Ωm for samples with the lowest moisture content.