Cosmo Intelligence uses Space Intelligence to monitor Tailings Storage Facilities. We use InSAR Satellite Data to measure deformation and ground movement, complemented by Hyperspectral and Multispectral Satellite Data to identify Environmental and Surface changes across your facility, our objective is to provide the necessary intelligence that could be critical for preventing Catastrophic Failures or Operational Disruption.
Satellites add an independent layer of surveillance that covers the whole facility on every pass. Radar measures how the embankment and the ground around it are moving, optical and multispectral imagery show what is changing on the surface, and for most sites the imagery archive reaches back to the mid-2010s, so the record starts years before the first report.
Satellite radar measures settlement and displacement along the crest, across the downstream face and at the toe to millimetre precision. Imaging the facility from two orbital directions helps separate vertical settlement from horizontal movement, and the time series shows whether that movement is steady, slowing or beginning to accelerate.
Some of the most damaging failures on record started in the foundation rather than in the dam itself. Abutments, natural slopes and the ground around a facility are rarely instrumented as densely as the embankment, so we measure surface movement across the whole footprint and beyond it, wherever it starts rather than only where an instrument happens to be.
Optical and radar imagery map the supernatant pond and the beach between it and the embankment on every pass, with radar working through cloud and at night. A pond drifting towards the crest, or a beach that is narrowing, gives an early and independent read on shrinking freeboard.
Multispectral imagery tracks surface moisture and vegetation on the downstream face and around the toe. New wet areas, or vegetation behaving differently from its surroundings, can be the first visible sign of seepage, and we flag them so they can be checked on the ground.
High-resolution imagery records raises, earthworks, deposition and drainage works as they happen, along with erosion, slumping and other damage on the slopes. The result is an independent account of what was built and when, to set against the design.
New homes, roads and infrastructure in the path a failure would take can change a facility’s consequence classification. We map the area below each facility on the same schedule, so changes in who and what is exposed are recorded as they happen rather than found at the next review.
The movement that precedes a collapse is usually measured in tens of millimetres a year — too slow to see, too small to feel, and easy to miss between one inspection and the next.
On September 11th 2022 the tailings dam at a diamond reprocessing operation in Jagersfontein, a historic mining town in South Africa’s Free State, collapsed early in the morning. Around six million cubic metres of slurry swept more than eight kilometres through the town and across the surrounding farmland, smothering close to 200 homes and around 1,600 hectares of agricultural and grazing land. At least two people died and another was never found, and residents received no official warning.
On January 25th 2019 the tailings facility at the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in Brumadinho failed in seconds. It killed 270 people, released 9.7 million cubic metres of tailings in under five minutes and contaminated more than 300 kilometres of river downstream. That facility was instrumented, monitored and reported as stable. It collapsed with no apparent warning.
On November 5th 2015 the Fundão tailings facility near Mariana in Brazil released roughly 44 million cubic metres of iron ore tailings. It buried the village of Bento Rodrigues, killed nineteen people and contaminated more than 600 kilometres of the Doce river system, reaching the Atlantic seventeen days later. Federal prosecutors went on to charge four companies and twenty-two executives, citing internal documents indicating the risk had been understood.
On August 4th 2014 the tailings storage facility at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine in British Columbia breached, releasing around 25 million cubic metres of water and tailings into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. The outflow scoured Hazeltine Creek into a mudflow 150 metres wide and seven kilometres long, and at the time it was the largest spill of mine tailings ever documented. The independent expert panel found that a weak layer of glacial clay in the foundation had not been accounted for in the design, or in the dam raises that followed.
On April 25th 1998 the tailings dam at the Los Frailes mine near Aznalcóllar in southern Spain failed when the ground beneath it gave way. Millions of cubic metres of acidic, metal-laden water and tailings poured into the Agrio and Guadiamar rivers, contaminating more than 60 kilometres of waterway and over 4,000 hectares of land before emergency barriers stopped the flow at the edge of Doñana National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The clean-up took three years, and the disaster helped prompt the European Union’s Extractive Waste Directive.
On February 22nd 1994 the number four tailings facility at a gold mine in South Africa’s Free State failed after a storm dropped 50mm of rain in half an hour. Six hundred thousand cubic metres of liquefied tailings ran four kilometres through the suburb of Merriespruit, which sat 300 metres downslope. Seventeen people died and eighty houses were destroyed. The facility had a documented history of inadequate freeboard and slope problems, water had been seen running through the town for around two hours beforehand, and the inquiry that followed found the owner, the operator and six of their employees negligent.
On July 19th 1985 the upper of two tailings dams serving the Prestavel fluorite mine above the village of Stava gave way and fell onto the dam below it, which failed in turn. Around 180,000 cubic metres of tailings, sand and water poured down the valley at close to 90 kilometres an hour, through Stava and on to Tesero, until it reached the Avisio river 4.2 kilometres downstream. It killed 268 people and destroyed three hotels, 53 homes, six industrial buildings and eight bridges. The criminal case that followed ended in convictions for culpable disaster and multiple manslaughter.
In the Brumadinho case, researchers from The University of Nottingham went back through the satellite radar archive afterwards. The analysis, published in Communications Earth & Environment, found the facility had been deforming in a way inconsistent with normal settlement, and concluded that the timing of the collapse would have been foreseeable from satellite imagery. Later research utilising Satellite imagery put the first clear risk signature at least five months before the catastrophic collapse.
The Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management was written in response to Brumadinho and sets 77 auditable requirements across 15 principles. Operators are expected to demonstrate, rather than assert, that a facility is performing as designed. ICMM member companies committed to conform by August 2023 for facilities with extreme or very high consequence classifications and by August 2025 for all others, and an independent audit and certification regime is now being built around the standard.
These are the standards, programmes and laws that make tailings monitoring an obligation rather than a choice, many of them introduced in direct response to the failures above.
Under the standard, monitoring is a requirement rather than an option. Principle 7 requires operators to design, implement and operate monitoring systems through every phase of a facility’s life, including closure, and to evaluate the results and act on them. Operators must also appoint an Accountable Executive and an Engineer of Record, commission independent reviews, and publish information about each facility at least once a year. In Brazil and the European Union comparable obligations are written into law, and investors and insurers increasingly expect to see evidence of conformance.
Independent, continuous, whole-of-facility measurement is no longer a nice-to-have. It is what auditors, insurers and boards ask to see.
We are independent of whoever supplies your instrumentation and independent of the site itself, which is what makes the record useful in exactly those conversations.
We Acquire Satellite Imagery from a wide variety of Sources
We Analyse the Imagery with our AI Models
We Generate Accurate Risk Intelligence
We Deliver You the Key Insights every 2 weeks via a PDF Report, and we immediately alert you when a movement has crossed a threshold
Cosmo Intelligence works on a problem where being wrong is expensive and being late is worse. That shapes who we look for. We care more about judgement, rigour and the willingness to be responsible for an answer than about a particular degree or a particular employer on a CV.
We are interested in people across remote sensing and radar interferometry, geotechnical and mining engineering, software and data engineering, and the commercial side of putting a technical product in front of the people who need it. If your background sits slightly outside those descriptions but the work speaks to you, we would still like to hear from you.
Write to hashim@cosmointelligence.co. Tell us what you have worked on, what you would want to work on here, and anything you have built that you are proud of. Every message is read, and we would rather hear from you early than not at all.