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ESG - Kingston's ear to the ground

December 24, 2000: an earthquake shakes southern California at a magnitude of 4.4 on the Richter scale. January 10, 2001: a strong earthquake hits the coast of southwest Alaska. January 13, 2001: a devastating earthquake rocks El Salvador killing over 1,000 people.

Dozens of major earthquakes strike every year all over the world, seemingly without warning.

While earthquakes are often hard to predict, it turns out the earth is not entirely unreadable. In situations where industry needs to understand the ground, seismologists are called upon to 'listen' to the rocks.

Advanced, computerized technology that makes this listening possible is produced right here in Kingston by the Engineering Seismology Group.

The founding members of ESG — James Alexander, Roger Bowes, Ted Urbancic and Cezar Trifu — became acquainted in the 1980s while they were all participating in a research group at Queen's University studying man-made micro earthquakes. When the group disbanded in 1993, Urbancic and Trifu decided to continue the work. Since the mining industry had a vested interest in the further development of the instrumentation that was used in the study, Alexander and Bowes were chosen to complete the team and ESG was launched in 1993.

The mining industry saw the potential of the instrumentation that had been used by the Queen's study for gathering data pertaining to man-made seismic events.

We've all seen the Hollywood scenes of peril, often set in days past, in which workers tirelessly dig tunnels and haul ore, wondering whether they would find what they were looking for and whether the ceiling will fall in.

As you might expect, the opening of a mine can cause significant changes in the surrounding rocks. A seismic survey carried out before the digging starts can provide meaningful and accurate data which mining companies can use to work around or compensate for problems that may lie in wait for them.

ESG has developed a system in which small micro-quake sensors are placed throughout a site to detect micro-earthquakes. Analog impulses generated by the sensors race down fast fibre optic connections to a PC where ESG's Hyperion software digitizes them and interprets the data to create a picture of the underlying rock formations.

ESG has also designed monitoring systems for other industries and applications. For example, ESG's Ultrasonic Monitoring System, while originally designed to study the stability of potential nuclear waste repository sites, can be used to monitor structures such as bridge abutments.

This year, ESG will be exhibiting at the world fair of the Mining Industry, the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM) Tradex 2001, March 8-10 in Québec City (http://www.cim.org/tradex/). The CIM has over 1,200 individual and 200 corporate members worldwide.

ESG continues to develop its products and position itself as a producer of precision instrumentation. Anywhere the behaviour of the earth's crust needs to be studied, ESG hardware may be called upon to listen. ESG now serves such exotic locales such as Shantou, China, where the Hyperion Microseismic System (HMS) is used at a Butane/Propane liquid gas storage facility, and South Korea where ESG gear monitors liquid petroleum gas storage.