Mining/Post-mining Surface Deformation

Mining industry is a source of surface ground motion during the active phase and after the mine’s closure. To anticipate potential consequences of this motion (buildings and infrastructures damages) or to correctly mitigate them, a proper understanding of the phenomena involved is needed. For this purpose, monitoring, generally based on ground geodetic techniques, is required by risk managers and is in certain cases a prerequisite of local regulations. Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry (InSAR) appears as a potential alternative for such a monitoring. In this chapter, we present the most frequent typologies of mining-related phenomena resulting in ground motion. Due to the diversity of possible motion characteristics (motion rate from mm/year to m/year and deformation extend from hundreds of meters to hundreds of kilometers) resulting from mining activity, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry can contribute to the mining/post-mining risk analysis through different methods (from conventional differential SAR interferometry to multi-temporal SAR interferometric time series) using different sensors (different spatial resolutions, repeat cycles, and signal frequencies). This chapter discusses the adequation of different SAR interferometric (InSAR) techniques in different mining-related contexts.