In a new open access paper published in Scientific Reports, Franks et al. (2021) show that 10% of tailings facilities have a history of instability. This rises to 18.3% for active upstream facilities.

The 2.53 million cubic metre tailings spill at Luming Mine in Heilongjiang Province, China on 28 March 2020: so what happened next?

Based on the information available so far, can we crowd source an understanding of what happened to cause the Luming Mine tailings accident in China?

More information on the Luming Mine tailings leak in China on 28 March 2020, including images of the disastrous downstream impacts

A significant tailings accident occurred on 28 March 2020, this time at the Luming Mine in Heilongjiang Province in NE China.

The exceptional mobility of tailings dam failures I’m continuing to write my paper for the keynote at the 13th International Symposium on Landslides in Colombia this year (the paper is due this month, so the pressure is on). As I noted in a post last week, I’ve been looking at the impact of landslides in less developed countries; one key component of this is the impact of failures associated with …

Last month the official Expert Panel released its report on the Feijao tailings dam disaster at Brumadinho in Brazil, which killed over 300 people.

On 1st October 2019, another significant tailings dam failure occurred in Brazil, this time at Nosso Senhora do Livramento in Mato Grosso.

The failure of the Stava tailings dam in Trento, Italy in 1985 generated a mudflow that killed 268 people downstream of the facility.

Planet Labs have kindly collected a high resolution SkySat image of the Cobriza Mine tailings failure in Peru, which happened on 10th July 2019.