With the successful monitoring of over a dozen tailings storage facilities (TFSs) across Southern Africa in its portfolio, real-time monitoring and alerting solutions provider Insight Terra continues to offer scalable and extensible mine tailings monitoring solutions.

These real-time monitoring systems recently proved their value through detecting an anomaly indicating a gradual rise in a water table.

This early signal, identified through continuous measurement and automated analysis, prompted site teams to investigate and confirm the change before it could affect operations, reports Insight Terra co-founder and CEO Alastair Bovim.

“The investigation revealed improper drain cleaning as the root cause, prompting a work stoppage and corrective training,” he says.

The incident, explains Bovim, underscored how proactive, data-driven monitoring can strengthen risk management and improve decision-making in mine water and geotechnical control.

The water table, or phreatic surface, defines the boundary between saturated and unsaturated zones within a TSF.

Continuous monitoring of its position is fundamental to understanding the hydraulic behaviour of the TSF structure, as fluctuations influence pore water pressures, seepage patterns and overall slope stability, he says.

Robust water management is therefore a primary critical control in TSF design and operation, underpinning both structural integrity and regulatory compliance, adds Bovim.

For TSF management, beach length – the horizontal distance between the ponded water edge and the dam crest – is often measured manually, and while this meets regulatory reporting requirements, he says it leaves significant temporal gaps, as subtle changes in pond geometry or water retreat can easily go unnoticed between manual surveys.

To address this, Insight Terra integrates Earth observation data which includes satellite images, ground measurements, photos, radar and processed information, such as maps and weather forecasts, in conjunction with live Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor data collected from the ground.

Using optical and radar satellite imagery, beach length can now be measured remotely, and more frequently, says Bovim.

These Earth observation-derived observations are validated against, and used to augment, data from ground-based sensors such as Global Navigation Satellite System measurements, water-level sensors and piezometers.

Earthly Evolution

Bovim tells Mining Weekly that South Africa’s tailings monitoring is evolving towards predictive integrity management.

“Satellites, like synthetic aperture radar [SAR] satellite developer and operator Synspective’s STRIX, advanced instrumentation and AI fusion pipelines work together to provide continuous insight supporting stability and assurance,” he explains.

High-frequency Earth observation is enabled through Synspective’s StriX X-band SAR constellation, which delivers sub-meter resolution with revisit intervals as short as one to three days, depending on latitude.

This solution’s high interferometric coherence and precise phase stability make it particularly well suited for interferometric SAR deformation monitoring of TSFs, embankments and waste dumps.

By detecting millimetre-scale ground movement across large areas, the system provides engineers with early indicators of deformation trends and structural stress.

When integrated with on-site instrumentation and real-time IoT data, this space-borne insight enables a more complete understanding of geotechnical behaviour, supporting predictive maintenance, risk mitigation and compliance with international standards such as the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) and ICMM’s guidelines.

Combined with public and commercial optical data, Bovim says this will create a persistent, spatially complete record of dam behaviour, transforming imagery from a single-layer view into a core input for multivariate analytics alongside ground data.

He adds that ground networks are also becoming denser and smarter. Advanced instruments such as geophones, distributed fibre-optic sensors and radar-based water-level flow systems extend monitoring beyond traditional piezometers.

Using edge analytics and automated calibration, these instruments stream physics-based insights – including vibration, strain, acoustic energy and seepage – directly to the cloud, strengthening their correlation with satellite data.





As the GISTM framework evolves and independent audit requirements expand, these integrated data pipelines will play a “vital” role in ensuring forensic readiness, adds Bovim.

By generating verifiable, time-stamped and traceable datasets, they provide an auditable record of monitoring activities, supporting transparent reporting, post-event analysis and continuous compliance assurance.

With tailings management spanning multiple disciplines, including geotechnical, hydrology and geological, as well as surface and subsurface fields, Insight Terra’s platform is adaptable, technology agnostic and designed to meet future requirements, says Bovim.