From timesofisrael.com

Tunnel detection tech can work for Israel, says expert

It won’t be easy, says Paul Bauman — who ‘discovered’ Atlantis – but technology can help the IDF find Gaza tunnels

Soldiers from the Givati Brigade seen at the entrance to a Hamas attack tunnel on July 23, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge. (Israel Defense Forces/Flash90)

Israel has sent troops into Gaza City to blow up terrorist tunnels, at heavy cost. What puzzles one expert is why the IDF hasn’t instead used technology to find the tunnels, just as it has exploited high-tech capabilities for the conflict’s greatest success — Iron Dome.

Paul Bauman, a Canadian who is one of the world’s foremost experts ondiscovering underground tunnels and voids, insists that the technology exists and has been used in the US, Canada, Korea, and other places. “We actually did some work with the IDF some years ago, showing them how the technology we’ve developed works,” Bauman told The Times of Israel in an interview. “They were interested, but there was no follow-up. Why, I couldn’t say.”

The IDF said it could not comment on the matter.

Had the army worked with Bauman, using the sophisticated methods he has developed and successfully employed over the past decade, things might have been different. While there is no foolproof, single tech solution to discovering tunnels, a combination of several techniques — radar, tomography, and seismic measuring — could give Israel a technological advantage over Hamas, creating a map of what is happening under the surface, and making it much easier to find tunnels and the terrorists who dig them.

Bauman knows all about underground exploration. Along with University of Hartford archaeologist Richard Freund, he gained fame as the team that discovered the lost city of Atlantis — or at least what could be Atlantis, located beneath an underwater marsh outside the Straits of Gibraltar off the coast of Spain.

Using electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), a sort of MRI for below the surface exploration, Bauman and Freund found artifacts, including bronze-age statues, that were carbon-dated to about 4,000 years ago, corresponding to the account of the life and death of Atlantis, as told by Greek philosopher Plato. According to Freund, it is likely that a tsunami destroyed the city, burying it underwater. The saga was memorialized in a 2011 documentary called Finding Atlantis that aired on the National Geographic Channel.

Bauman, technical director of the geophysics group at the Calgary, Canada offices of Australian resources consulting firm WorleyParsons, has also worked with Freund on numerous underground exploration projects in Israel, including discovering a Qumran cave, using ERT to map the floor of the Cave of Letters (where some of the most important Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls were found), enabling archaeologists to discover new artifacts and develop a map of the Second Temple-era Jewish revolt.

It was on one of his exploration trips to Israel that Bauman showed the IDF some of the techniques it could use to discover underground tunnels. At the time, after another Gaza flare-up, Operation Cast Lead in 2009, a Technion team led by researchers Dr. Raphael Linker and Dr. Assaf Klar were developing a system that uses a fiber optic cable buried one or two meters beneath the surface to detect underground movement. The system builds what is essentially an underground fence using BOTDR (Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry) technology, which measures the stress on the cable underground.

The amount of stress may be very small, the team said, and its research shows that even small levels of deformation can be detected, making the system perfect for keeping tabs on tunnel builders. The cable is cheap, and as much as 30 kilometers of the border can be monitored simultaneously using one device. It’s not clear if the IDF considered that system as well, and in an email this week, Linker said that the system is still under development.

One thing that Israel has considered in the past to deter the Gaza terrorists’ propensity for tunnel construction is a moat. The moat plan, first proposed in 2004, before Israel withdrew from Gaza, would have hadIsrael dig out an inlet along the Gaza-Sinai border, allowing seawater to flow in, thus preventing tunnel digging — or making it much more difficult. At the time, Israel’s main concern was preventing Gazans from smuggling rocket manufacturing material in from Sinai. The problem of underground terror tunnels into Israel wasn’t yet on the IDF’s radar.

A moat, said Bauman, would be a “dumb” idea, because it would pollute the coastal aquifer that both Israel and Gaza rely on for water. Much better, he said, would be a technique like underground radar to find tunnels. “Israel has been very interested in this, and Israeli companies are working on underground radar systems,” said Bauman. “In an underground radar system, you aim the wave down below the ground, and when you get back a signal that is an anomaly — indicating that there is something different about the area you just checked than other areas — you know you’ve found something worth investigating.”

There are limitations to the system, though. “Depending on the frequency of the radar wave, you can have a system that can ‘see’ as far down as 100 meters, but at low resolution, or just 10 meters at a better resolution,” Bauman said. Radar could be very useful in discovering larger concrete tunnels, which have metal rebar in them — concrete and metal being much denser than the gypsum and salt-rich soil around the Gaza border — but not for the simpler, smaller wood-reinforced tunnels.

Radar is just one technique Bauman uses in his exploration of underground tunnels, lakes, and voids — the kind of work he does every day in western Canada, where he searches for old mines and dugouts, in order to ensure that new buildings aren’t constructed in the wrong place. Besides radar, Bauman uses ERT — a technique that lets researchers do inverse modeling of underground features.

“You place electrodes in or on the ground, and send down current. You then measure the voltage that is returned, measuring the resistance of the earth. Again, an anomaly indicates that further investigation is necessary,” said Bauman. For Israel, ERT would likely be a very successful technique. “Israel already has a fence around Gaza, so the electrodes could just be added to the existing foundation of the fence. You could set up an automated system that would send down current probes every few seconds, building a baseline picture of what the readings should be — and setting off an alarm as soon as an anomaly, indicating a tunnel or underground movement, is detected.”

Yet a third technique Bauman has used successfully in the past is a seismic detection technique called MASW — multichannel analysis of surface waves, measuring shear-wave velocity. “You use an acoustic source, like a hammer, to knock the ground and create sound waves known as ground roll. When there is anomaly in the resulting waves when you pass over an area indicating that the area below where you knocked is different than other areas, that is also an anomaly that needs to be investigated.”

Israel is far from alone in dealing with tunnels. The techniques described by Bauman have been used with varying degrees of success to discover tunnels dug by smugglers and drug dealers under the US-Mexican border, and on the border between North and South Korea. “You have to remember that tunnels, for smuggling or terror, are not at all a uniquely Israeli problem,” said Bauman. “Other countries have similar problems, and are searching for tech solutions to tunnel detection.”

The secret of successful tunnel detection, said Bauman, is not to rely on a single technology — but a combination. “Each of these methods has their advantages and disadvantages, but the objective should be building a map of the underground features around Gaza, so that, with constant monitoring, changes can be detected, which would indicate tunnel construction or use,” said Bauman. “Each of these techniques can contribute to building that map. Unfortunately, there’s no single silver bullet, but keeping a watchful eye what is happening underground will, I believe, go a long way to solving the problem.” source

From defense.gov

From 2017

Tunnel Detectors Ferret Out Enemy Below Ground

Enemy combatants lurking in tunnels have attacked U.S. troops throughout U.S. history, including during both world wars, Vietnam and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Detecting these secretive tunnels has been a challenge that has been answered by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s engineers at the Geotechnical and Structural Laboratory in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The lab developed the Rapid Reaction Tunnel Detection system, or R2TD, several years ago, according to Lee Perren, a research geophysicist at ERDC who spoke at the Pentagon’s lab day last month.

R2TD detects the underground void created by tunnels as well as the sounds of people or objects like electrical or communications cabling inside such tunnels, he said. The system is equipped with ground penetrating radar using an electromagnetic induction system.

Additionally, a variety of sensors detect acoustic and seismic energy, he added.

The detection equipment data can then be transmitted remotely to analysts who view the data in graphical form on computer monitors.

The system can be carried by a soldier or used inside a vehicle to scan suspected tunnel areas, he said.

Deployed Since 2014

R2TD has been deployed overseas since 2014, he said. Feedback from combat engineers who used the system indicated they like the ease of use and data displays. It takes just a day to train an operator, Perren said.

Jen Picucci, a research mathematician at ERDC’s Structural Engineering Branch, said that technology for detecting tunnels has been available for at least a few decades.

However, the enemy has managed to continually adapt, building tunnels at greater depths and with more sophistication, she said.

In response, ERDC has been trying to stay at least a step ahead of them, continually refining the software algorithms used to reject false positives and false negatives, she said. Also, the system upgraded to a higher power cable-loop transmitter to send signals deeper into the ground.

The improvements have resulted in the ability to detect deeper tunnels as well as underground heat and infrastructure signatures, which can discriminate from the normal underground environment, she said.

Picucci said ERDC has shared its R2TD with the Department of Homeland Security as well as with the other military services and allies. For security reasons, she declined to say in which areas R2TD is being actively used.

Besides the active tunneling detection system, a passive sensing system employs a linear array of sensors just below the surface of the ground to monitor and process acoustic and seismic energy. These can monitored remotely, according to an ERDC brochure.

Past Usage

While current operations remain classified, ERDC field engineers have in the past traveled in to Afghanistan according to members of the team.

In 2011, for example, ERDC personnel set up tunnel detection equipment to search the underground perimeter of Camp Nathan Smith, Afghanistan, said Owen Metheny, a field engineer at ERDC who participated in the trip.

His colleague, Steven Sloan, a research geophysicist at ERDC in Afghanistan at the time, said the goal was to ensure safety at the camp.

“We make sure nobody is coming into the camp using underground avenues that normally wouldn’t be seen and wouldn’t be monitored,” Sloan said. “We check smaller isolated areas — usually areas of interests and perimeters.”

The researchers did a lot of traveling around Afghanistan.

“We travel to different regional commands and help out in the battle spaces of different military branches,” Sloan said. “We use geophysical techniques to look for anomalies underground. We look for things that stick out as abnormal that might indicate that there is a void or something else of interest. As we work our way through an area we look for how things change from spot to spot.”

“I really enjoy my job,” Metheny said. “I’m doing something for my country and helping keep people safe. Plus, where else could a bunch of civilians get to come to Afghanistan and look for tunnels?” source

Really too bad that the powers that be did not ‘help keep people safe in ISRAEL this past October 7th.

Maybe this technology was deliberately kept from Israel – ya think?

HOW CAN I BE SAVED?

MARANATHA!