Minefield Background

 Estimates of the number people killed or maimed each year by land mines range from 10,000 to 30,000.  Most of these are civilians and about half of these are children.  Estimates are that there are over 100 million land mines that  remain buried throughout the world

 Now that Cambodia has become a popular tourist destination, many western people are seeing first hand the results of left over mine fields.  A common comment from tourists is that there wasn’t a day or place in Cambodia when they didn’t see a number of people that had lost limbs, particularly children.

  Cambodia is not the only place with these problems.  The current loss of life and limbs in Columbia is significantly higher than Cambodia’s and those for Afghanistan are not far behind.

 There are many secondary effects of old minefields such as children not being able to play outside, loss of usable land, inability for villages to communicate and trade or simply the effect of living in fear.

  If there are dangers involved in coming to a village to help it get clean water, give it medical support or help it with any other services then there is less likelihood that the service will occur.  This is particularly true of a service that needs to access an area of land such as provision of a road, railway, electricity grid, communication network, running water or sewage disposal.

The problems of left over mine fields are very visible with large numbers of amputees, adults and children.  Regardless of this, one should not overestimate the problem.  There are other problems in the world that are far larger such as aids, famine and cancer.

  The real point is that using my knowledge and perhaps your knowledge of computer software and/or electronics I don’t know of any way to make a sizable inroad to these other problems whereas with this Open Source project we may achieve significant advances.  If it ends up helping to find just a small number of mines that wouldn't otherwise have been located then it will have been a worthwhile project.

Demining Information

There have been a large number of instruments or methods devised for finding buried mines.  These range from Nuclear Instruments through Ground Penetrating Radar to Bio techniques such as dogs, rats or bees trained to find explosives.  Most of these work and some are starting to be useful but at current (2008/2009) technology the most reliable ways to clear a minefield are to use standard coil based metal detectors or to prod every inch of the ground with sticks.

Although coil based metal detectors are reasonably good at finding mines, they are not yet reliable enough in discriminating between buried mines and other bits of metal such as shrapnel.    This results in large numbers of false indications.

It is common for a mine detector to give 1000 false indications of a mine for each actual mine that it finds.  Each of these false indications has to be handled as if it is a mine.

The result is that demining remains expensive and difficult to implement and the majority of known or suspected mine fields are simply being left there.

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