When it comes to safety in open-cast mining, soil stability is one of the most critical factors. Settlement of the ground or slipping of slopes poses a great risk to buildings and people. Now Mahdi Motagh from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ, in cooperation with Chinese scientists, has evaluated data from the Sentinel 1 mission of the European Union's Copernicus program and thus demonstrated new possibilities for monitoring mining areas. The three researchers used a special radar method, the Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR), to investigate lignite regions in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. They reported on this in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.
