Land minesHarnessing Drones, Geophysics and Artificial Intelligence to Remove Land Mines
Mines and other unexploded ordinance are a worldwide menace; about 100 million devices are thought to be currently scattered across dozens of countries. Aside from putting both wartime and postwar areas off limits to travel, agriculture or anything else, they caused at least 5,500 recorded casualties in 2019; totals in many previous years have been much higher. Some 80 percent of the victims are civilians, and of those, nearly half are children.
Armed with a newly minted undergraduate degree in geology, Jasper Baur is in the mining business. Not those mines where we extract metals or minerals; the kind that kill and maim thousands of people every year. Baur and colleagues are trying to show that drone-borne geophysical sensors already used in fields such as exploration geology, volcanology and archaeology may be applied to more efficiently spot and eliminate these deadly hazards
As a freshman at upstate New York’s Binghamton University in 2016, Baur started working with two geophysics professors, Alex Nikulin and Timothy de Smet, to look into employing instrument-equipped drones to speed the slow, hazardous task of finding land mines. Baur stuck with the research all the way through college; now a grad student in volcanology at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, he is still pursuing it.
“It seemed like a really relevant and impactful use of science,” he said. “It has a humanitarian aspect, and that’s definitely what motivates me in my research.”
Mines and other unexploded ordinance are a worldwide menace; about 100 million devices are thought to be currently scattered across dozens of countries. Aside from putting both wartime and postwar areas off limits to travel, agriculture or anything else, they caused at least 5,500 recorded casualties in 2019; totals in many previous years have been much higher. Some 80 percent of the victims are civilians, and of those, nearly half are children. Over the last decade, mines have been deployed in at least 15 countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Iran, Israel, Libya, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine and Yemen. This, despite the fact that more than 160 nations have signed a 1997 convention to bar their stockpiling or use (major exceptions: the United States, Russia and China).
Those who lay mines rarely come back to clear them. That generally falls to nonprofit humanitarian organizations, who mostly find them the old-fashioned way: on foot, slowly sweeping suspect sites with magnetometers or other handheld instruments. Finding and disarming a single mine takes plenty of time, and costs an estimated $300 to $1,000. “And, of course, it’s dangerous,” notes Baur.
