Use of Geostatistical Analyses for Characterizing Mine Tailings as Compared to Geophysics Profiles

Although geostatistical tools have been available for over 50 years, their implementation is uneven across geotechnical industry. One barrier to more widespread use of geostatistics in practice is the difficulty in knowing which realizations, of many error minimizing realizations, are representative of the actual subsurface conditions. When using a set of subsurface explorations, such as CPT, there can be many viable realizations of conditions. For a highly variable mine tailings pile orthogonal 2D MASW profiles showing material variability via shear wave velocity are compared to geostatistical realizations of materials between CPT soundings. Specifically, orthogonal 2D MASW lines were conducted to image the subsurface for soft and stiff locations potentially indicating rubble or debris in the subsurface, while CPT were performed for geotechnical shallow and deep foundation design. In this work the geophysics are used to “truth” the geostatistical analyses. This paper shows that 2D geophysical profiles and geostatistics can both be used to constrain subsurface uncertainties, drive successful foundation design, and control construction phase obstructions.