Professor of Physics Michael Naughton of Boston College has come up with a device that may make sweeping improvements in the effort to rid war-torn lands across the earth of landmines. The current global landmine crisis is largely the result of the huge increase in the number of mines laid in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the United Nations and the U.S. government estimated that some 2.5 million mines per year were being planted, while only 80,000 per year were being removed through mine clearance.
Part of the problem is that modernized landmines consist of materials that are non-metallic, making the devices previously used to remove them obsolete. With this new technology, experts are hoping that these modernized landmines that have taken many civilian casualties can be removed from war-torn lands.
The Micro-Electrical-Mechanical System (MEMS) sensor draws on the same technology used in everything from computer pentium processors to automobile airbags. Naughton has designed the tiny sensor to operate as a super-sensitive microphone that picks up sound waves that are bounced off objects buried underground. “We have strong evidence that low-frequency acoustic sensors see plastics better than radar or ultrasound, which is what we are excited about,” Naughton said.
Naughton has tested the device on objects that he buried under tons of play sand. The objects include cinder blocks, plastic toys and the shell of a deactivated landmine. So far, the microscopic sensor successfully detected the objects. “The premise is that a certain type of buried object will reflect acoustic waves at particular frequencies better than at other frequencies,” Naughton said, “like a tuning fork gives off a certain sound better than other sounds because it is tuned to it.”
The MEMS sensor has received a federal patent and has caught the attention of Sandia National Laboratories, which is a federal lab in New Mexico that researches the use of radar in finding landmines. However, Naughton believes that more than just radar will be needed to put together a device that can successfully take on the task of ridding the world of this landmine epidemic.
Studies say that over 100 million landmines lie buried in over 70 countries, many of them war-torn Muslim lands, such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa. Although these countries are in at least a remote time of peace, the residue of past conflicts shows clearly on the bodies of victims who have walked through patches of land that were once used as a war zone. It is estimated by the United Nations that land mines kill or maim more than 20,000 people a year. Over 2,000 people get injured or die from these landmines each month.
Therefore, breakthroughs such as these can make a world of difference to people throughout the world. Hopefully, this research will lead to further efforts to deal with modernized landmines and other sorts of devices that have been leftover from conflicts that have taken place or will take place in the future. “One can be made for every mine out there, if that’s what it takes,” Naughton said.
U.S. government mine experts in 1993 estimated that more than
65 million antipersonnel landmines were emplaced in the previous 15
years, an average of more than four million per year.
