Note: all event times are in eastern (EST/EDT)
Join us for an insightful session exploring how climate change can influence mine dewatering strategies, featuring cutting-edge integrated hydrologic modelling approaches.
Abstract:
Underground mining activities require constant removal of groundwater from their void spaces to maintain dry and safely accessible excavations for ore extraction in a process known as dewatering. The nature and degree of dewatering activities is heavily dependent on the amount of groundwater that can reach the mined areas and, conversely, dewatering of mines has a significant effect on the regional groundwater flow in their vicinity. Furthermore, groundwater supply to mining areas may be linked to climatic conditions, connected surface water bodies and the geologic structures that link the surface and subsurface. Typically, models that only represent groundwater flow are used in industry to simulate site conditions and to plan mine dewatering infrastructure. These models often take historical climate averages into account when determining recharge to groundwater from the surface, and they do not typically account for feedback between groundwater and surface water systems. While this has been sufficiently accurate in the past, it is expected that the progression of climate change will yield future estimates of groundwater recharge that differ significantly from historical averages. These changes may be captured more accurately with fully coupled methods of simulating groundwater and surface water simultaneously in areas with large surface water bodies overlying aquifers, or in locations where geologic structures provide significant preferential pathways between the surface and subsurface. Here, changes in predicted dewatering rates for a real mining property were estimated using a typical, industry standard fully saturated groundwater model with historically averaged recharge and a fully integrated groundwater/surface water model that incorporates results from future climate scenarios. Simulation results demonstrated that the fully integrated groundwater/surface water model better matched historic conditions, and the estimated rate of dewatering with future climate yielded was approximately 2% higher than that predicted by the fully saturated groundwater model with historical climate averages.
Presenter Bio:
Andrea Brookfield is an Associate Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Waterloo. Before this, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas, and an Assistant Scientist with the Kansas Geological Survey. Her research interests include the development and use of efficient yet effective numerical tools for resource management. Primarily, she studies the use of hydrological models to simulate flow and contaminant transport, including the thermal regime, for prediction, management, and process investigation.