The Canada-Ontario-industry rockburst project

Abstract

This project was started in 1985, after a particularly extensive period of rockburst activity in several Ontario mines. Three parties participated in the project: the Government of Canada, through CANMET, the Ontario Ministries of Labour and Northern Development and Mines, and the Ontario Mining Association.

The first two years of the project have been mainly devoted to the design and installation of new seismic monitoring systems. It is intended to install three different types of monitoring systems at the four mining camps experiencing rockbursts (Red Lake, Elliot Lake, Sudbury, and Kirkland Lake). Seismograph units will be installed at each mining camp to obtain permanent records of the larger seismic events and their magnitude. Macroseismic systems are being installed around five mines (Campbell, Quirke, Strathcona, Creighton and Macassa). These systems consist of triaxial, strong-motion geophones with processing units for event detection and data digitization. Complete waveforms are captured to study first motion, peak particle velocity, seismic energy and spectral frequency. At present 13 mines in Ontario operate their own microseismic systems which are used exclusively for real time source location of seismic events.

The instrumentation already installed and the present research activities at the mines are described in the paper.