- Title
- The application of ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography to clandestine gravesite discovery: a comparative analysis
- Creator
- Berezowski, Victoria Ray
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- There are 2,600 long-term missing individuals in Australia – people who have been missing for over three months. Although most people do not go missing under suspicious circumstances, some individuals are victims of homicide. In such cases, perpetrators can engage in detection avoidance behaviours, such as disposing of their victim in a clandestine grave. By nature, these graves are difficult to locate and present a key challenge to law enforcement agencies, which can significantly impact investigations as achieving a successful prosecution without a body is particularly difficult. Traditional search techniques employed to locate covert graves include pedestrian foot searches and cadaver dogs. Other methods, such as geophysical techniques, can also be used, however, these have largely not been applied in Australia. As a result, this thesis compares two geophysical techniques – ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) – and analyses their ability to locate clandestine graves under Australian field conditions. These techniques are part of a three-step process used to locate, document, and interpret clandestine graves. Researchers have agreed upon a standard of investigation for Steps 1 (site location) and 3 (documentation and interpretation). This research seeks to clarify Step 2 – grave location – and explores how the soil and climate conditions affect the observability of the graves, and whether domestic pig (Sus spp.) cadaver graves are adequate proxies for human donor graves. Through conducting identical GPR and ERT surveys of pig cadaver and human donor burials, the findings show that both GPR and ERT can observe the graves, however, the observability was inconsistent. The inconsistencies can be attributed to the soil, which lacked sedimentary and pedogenic structures, as well as the anomalous rainfall due to La Niña, for GPR and ERT, respectively. At the same time, the results showed that there are no obvious differences between the geophysical responses of pig cadaver and human donor graves, indicating that pig cadavers can be used as human proxies in the geophysical detection of clandestine graves. This allows for more experimental studies to be replicated in other soil and climate conditions without being constrained by human donor accessibility. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the likelihood of finding a body can be increased through an improved search strategy, such as the use of geophysical techniques.
- Subject
- forensic geophysics; clandestine grave; ground penetrating radar; electrical resistivity tomography; missing person; geographic profiling; geomatic techniques; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1510736
- Identifier
- uon:56446
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Victoria Ray Berezowski
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 8 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 466 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |