There has been some rearrangement to the ! folder within the root folder, which may affect some of your apps. This was primarily a move of tools which are not seismic specific from the ! folder to !/Base (so that mines without the seismic suite can use these tools). The most commonly used parts of this migration are anything that uses Filter Volumes, Grid definitions or Plane definitions.

A new app has appeared in the Rock Mass Data Analyser suite: the Geotechnical Domains Delimiter. This app allows you to create your own geotechnical domains; either from boundaries (e.g. lithological contacts or fault planes) or volumes (e.g. lithologies, domains, selection boxes).

A new window has been added to the Hazard Assessment app (Figure 1). The sensitivity analysis aims to quantify the effect of the variation of the input parameters on the hazard. These analyses can also help the user to determine the optimal settings to use for many of the parameters. This window allows the user to vary only one parameter at the time.

Recent updates which may be of interest to developers

There have been a number of recent updates to the Short-term Response Analysis app. These include:

• Chart for determining re-entry using different parameters: This chart gives you values for a particular parameter over time (based on a user-defined time window size and step). A threshold value for that parameter can be set, allowing you to see when the seismic data drops below that threshold. The parameter investigated can currently be set to energy, event count, hazard, background ratio and activity rate probability. For more information about these parameters, see Tierney et al. 2019.

The upgrade to mXrap version 5.16 introduced a variety of changes and improvements to marker styles. The changes can be separated into general updates which are relevant to all users and developer updates which are relevant to app developers who create and customise marker styles.

With the holidays approaching we thought we would send everyone some mXmas presents! And obviously what everyone wants for mXmas are mXrap videos ?. These videos are not geotech related but come from various games, generative art, or physics simulations that we have made for fun.

Energy and moment are two independent measures of the strength of a seismic event. Their physical meaning and how they are calculated was described in a previous blog post. Analysis of the relationship between the energy and moment of events can provide insight into seismic sources. For example, blasts or ore pass noise, falsely processed as real events, tend to have distinct zones on an energy-moment chart. In general, events with higher-than-average energy are associated with high relative stress.

The Caving Suite is a set of applications that provide tools for the analysis and interpretation of cave monitoring data sources. Currently, four apps are included in the Caving Suite: Caving Sandbox, Fragmentation, Open Hole Dipping, and Caving Hydraulic Radius (see app overview for more details)

The Rock Mass Data Analyser (RMDA) application allows a user to import various types of geotechnical data (rock mass quality, structural, stress and intact rock strength) into mXrap, creating a geotechnical database which may be visualised and analysed in 3D, on charts and in stereonets (see previous blog post for more details).