Automated Detection and Location of Mining Induced Seismicity From Rudna Copper Mine, SW Poland

Rudna Mine's productive level is located between 900m and 1200m depth, under- and overlain by hard and rigid rock strata. The depth of the ore body, the ability to accumulate strain energy by surrounding rocks and highly variable tectonic conditions cause a high rate of seismicity, resulting in a respective hazard and risk. Micro-seismicity and up to intermediate magnitude events have been recorded in the area. We look at a series of events from magnitudes between M3 and above M4 from March 2013 to January 2019 which produced mine collapses and caused in total more than 10 fatalities.

We present results from an automated full-waveform detection and location algorithm (BackTrackBB, Poiata et al., 2016) applied to the seismological data recorded by a surface network. LUMINEOS is operated by the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The data is available as the LGCD episode on //tcs.ah-epos.eu. In a first step, we analyze the data of the days in which the mine collapses occurred. Later, larger data sets around the collapses should account for expected fore- and aftershock activities.

Resulting catalogs for the days of the main events exhibit general increase in detections and loca-tions of potential seismic events in comparison to STA/LTA triggered catalogs. However, these new catalogs contain different types of events caused by a number of activities like destress and production blastings, machinery noise, rockfall noise, induced seismic events and possible triggered events related to nearby faults. Further analysis of the detailed catalogs allow for high resolution studies on mechanical and statistical characteristics of the seismic activities which will add insight into relating processes between provoking activities.

This work was supported under the SERA project, European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, grant No 730900. Also partially supported by statutory activities No 3841/E-41/S/2019 of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland.