Geostatistical methods applied to contaminated land by abandoned metal mining

摘要

Mining operations related to the production,transportation, processing and abandoned mine workingsundoubtedly cause varying degree of environmental damages inmining areas. The great antiquity and global distribution of themetal mining industry has resulted in significant areas of landbeing affected by spillage and disposal waste material.Geostatistical methods are useful for site assessment,characterisation and monitoring situations where data arecollected on a spatial network of sampling locations, and areparticularly suited to cases where contour maps of contaminantconcentration or other variables are desired. This paperconsiders variogram and kriging methods of geostatistics usedfor the assessment of sampling strategy and data interpretationfor potentially contaminated land. kriging of the data wasconducted to smooth out the contours and the maps were plotted.The maps indicated the specific areas of contamination. A casestudy is used to illustrate the application of technique to anabandoned metal mining site in the UK.