Demining Research at the University of Western Australia

LANDMINES

Demining is the action of removing landmines, booby traps and unexploded ordnance (UXO) from an area. Mines and booby traps are normally hidden and most often buried. There are two main aims for demining: to enable a military force to achieve their objective, or to return the land to productive use.

Military Demining only requires a safe corridor for the troops to move through. They can also accept some losses as an expected part of the conflict. Therefore a flail machine with an 80% clearance success can be used. This sort of clearance operation is not suited to Humanitarian Demining.

Humanitarian Demining requires that the entire land area be free of mines. The United Nations has specified a mine clearance standard of 99.6% for humanitarian demining. That means that for every one thousand mines removed from the ground a maximum of four are missed. Currently the only way to achieve this is with manual demining methods.

What is manual demining?

Manual Demining is the procedure where mines are manually detected and neutralised by a human deminer. It is the only guaranteed method of removing landmines and achieving the United Nations requirement.

A deminer will first scan the ground with a metal detector. Most mines contain enough metal to be detectable by this method. The accuracy of the metal detection depends heavily on the level of mineralisation in the ground and the type of mine used in the area.

A path approximately 1m wide is marked inward from the edge of the mined area, using the metal detector to check the ground. Only about one in every thousand signals detected will belong to a mine or UXO, this high rate of false readings is generally due to metal fragments such as shell casings littering the battlefield. When a signal is encountered, the deminer marks the spot and then probes the ground with a prodder. The deminer uses the prodder to 'feel' for the object causing the signal and then carefully uncover it. If a mine is found, it is marked so that it can be detonated later and the deminer starts forging a new path into the mined area.

The mines are detonated in the ground to eliminate any risk of them detonating during an attempt to defuse them. All the mines are detonated at the same time of the day with small charges of explosive placed next to the mine.

Prodding is the most dangerous activity for the deminer. The work is carried out from a prone or squatting position where the deminer probes the ground at an angle of 30 degrees using a bayonet or similar tool. When the encounter a solid object, the dirt has to be carefully scraped away. The deminer has to keep searching until the object that set off the metal detector is uncovered or removed in the waste. If the metallic object is small: such as a fragment of rusty iron, it can be extremely difficult to find.

What is manual demining?

Why aren´t machines used instead?

For more on land mine problems and solutions...

What does this mean for the needs of deminers?