30 years of ground motions in the UK: lessons learnt to produce a national interpreted ground deformation map.

To extract the most information from a national InSAR dataset it is imperative to understand the mechanisms leading to motion and how these manifest in an InSAR dataset such as the EGMS. The British Geological Survey (BGS) have been at the forefront of UK InSAR ground motion interpretation for the past 22 years; in projects such as ESA’s Terrafirma, thematic FP7 projects e.g. PanGeo and SubCoast, and provide expert advice to the UK government surrounding potential fracking sites and CCS sites along with a sustained research programme. BGS also produce national hazard susceptibility mapping, known as GeoSure, which is routinely used by insurance companies to assess ground motion hazards.

The study of many epochs of InSAR data for many study sites provide the opportunity to examine how patterns of subsidence have evolved with time and how this relates to the processes taking place. This presentation will illustrate the evolution of ground motions within the UK over the last 30 years, case studies will highlight the lessons learnt especially with respect to how the change in geological process manifests in the InSAR signal. For example, a striking change in ground motion patterns over a time period occurred in the Newcastle and Durham Coalfield (Gee et al., 2017) where a dramatic change in the pattern of motion was observed between subsidence in the 1990’s ERS data and uplift in the 2000’s ENVISAT data. This was found to relate to change in minewater pumping. Therefore, to create a national interpreted ground motion product it is important to not only understand the mechanism of motion but also understand how that process changes over time. 

Recent research has focused on the prediction of which UK hazards will be visible and measurable by InSAR (Novellino et al., 2023), and on the prediction of likely natural motion rates for the natural geological subsidence processes (Jones et al., 2013). BGS have developed automatic AI and ML tools which examine not only the InSAR average velocity but also the time series to group areas of similar motion characteristics and to then detect when changes occur (Festa et al., 2023, Hussain et al., 2021.). The application of such tools to the EGMS time series and integration of results with BGS GeoSure national hazard susceptibility datasets provide a pathway to the ongoing interpretation of national GB wide InSAR datasets.

The above experience puts the BGS in a unique position for the exploitation of the new Copernicus European Ground Motion Service which represents the first freely available national UK InSAR dataset. Over the coming years it is BGS’ ambition is to apply our experience of UK hazard susceptibility, how these hazards manifest in InSAR data, our fledgling automated interpretation tools and visibility mapping to produce the first dynamic country-wide interpreted ground motion information layer; a value added product which not only tells the user what the motion is but also identifies the likely reason for the motion along with forecasts of how such motion might evolve in the coming years.