Contents I. Introduction
The application of GPR in both salt and potash mines has enjoyed considerable success for many decades. Dry salt has a low dielectric permittivity, making GPR an ideal imaging technology for these environments. The Province of Saskatchewan in Canada has the largest potash deposits in the world, and GPR has been used in these mines for 40 years ([1]–[3], and [4]). Likewise, in Germany, where both salt and potash are mined, GPR has been a valuable tool and has been demonstrated to improve both operational efficiency and safety ([5], [6], and [7]). Potash and salt has also been mined in the Canadian Province of New Brunswick (on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean) since the 1980's, but the use of GPR in these mines has been sporadic. In the recently commissioned Picadilly potash mine in New Brunswick, two operational challenges were encountered: 1) occasionally the ore seam had more variability than expected and thus following the seam while mining was challenging; and 2) development and salt mining in the geomechanically competent salt (below ore level) occasionally encountered large seemingly isolated “blocks” of anhydrite which impacted development schedules. As development of the mine progressed, comprehensive in-mine horizontal drilling and auger drilling was used to better understand the geology. The abundance of geological information provides valuable ground-truthing data for testing the efficacy of GPR in the Picadilly mine. What follows is a description of the GPR investigations at this mine.
