Anomalies of mountainous mining paddy in western China

• We infer to the movement of soil moisture in leaking paddy caused by mining.
• We concluded the positions of anomalies in leaking paddy caused by coal-mining by the ground penetration radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT).
• We verify the detection results by the infiltration test which limited by soil depth and soil bulk density above the anomalies.

Mining in western China, particularly in the southern regions of the Yangtze River such as Chongqing, has created surface fissures in soils that can cause severe geological disasters, for example, paddies can lose water and become dry land. The objectives of this study are to detect anomalies in paddy fields by using geophysical exploration technologies such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), and to verify the detection of leaking zones by using saturated hydraulic conductivity (K) with a simplified falling head infiltrometric technique (SFH). We discover that GPR and ERT used in conjunction produce the best results because GPR detects abnormal details in the shallow layers of the soil, and ERT detects water leakage channels in complex terrain and deep underground. However, the soil saturated hydraulic conductivity of our study area could be affected by the depth and soil density above the fissure, which may interfere with anomaly detection.