An Australian breakthrough that has the potential to help numerous people around the world

Share and Follow

An Australian company has achieved the “holy grail” of landmine detection, developing technology which it says can definitively tell if hidden explosives lie underground.

Those looking to build technology capable of scanning for explosives, rather than for the metal in landmines, have searched for a solution for more than two decades, Nick Cutmore of tech company MRead said.

Around 6,000 people are killed and wounded every year by landmines, despite the international adoption of the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty nearly three decades ago.

Cutmore, the firm’s chief technology officer, said the company has developed a device similar to a metal detector that uses magnetic resonance to detect explosive compounds.

“[There’s] nothing around in current technology that can look into the ground and tell you that there’s absolutely explosive there and count the number of explosive molecules present,” he said.

“That’s exactly what we do.”

“The closest analogy that you could think of in your daily life is the MRI scan in a hospital, where you basically have radio waves going into you as the object, and the radio waves that come back help to form the image of that scan. We do something similar,” Cutmore said.

Landmine clearance operations are slow, and current devices typically detect metal, leading to hundreds of false positives, as former battlefields are also littered with shrapnel, debris, and other metal.

Many mines are now made from plastic, partly because it’s difficult to detect.

Trials for the MRead technology took place in Angola on the same minefields that Princess Diana visited in the 1990s.

Conducted in collaboration with demining organisation The HALO Trust, the trials demonstrated the device’s ability to detect the explosive compound RDX.

But the team was only halfway there.

Princess Diana walking through a minefield

Princess Diana visited a minefield in Huambo, in Angola. Credit: AP

TNT, the most common explosive used in landmines, was successfully identified in laboratory testing in Australia last month — a major breakthrough.

Bruce Edwards, head of partnerships at The Halo Trust, said, “I’m a big fan of saying there is no silver bullet in our work, and people ask about game changers all the time.”

“If we can have a detector that does detect both RDX and TNT within metal and plastic mines, then this has got to be close to a game changer. “

The team hopes the lab results will translate to reality.

Dual explosive mine detector in development

A new prototype that can detect both TNT and RDX, explosives believed to be found in 90 per cent of mines globally, is now in development, with active minefield trials expected to start in 2026.

Edwards said: “As I said, no silver bullet, but definitely a breakthrough. It is exciting. Absolutely. And as an Australian, I’ve got to say, it is quite nice to have this Australian contribution being made across the world, and I’d love to see them in Ukraine.”

Ukraine is now believed to be the most dangerous place on Earth for unexploded weapons.

It’s estimated that millions of explosives have been strewn across battlefields in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Almost a quarter of the country is at risk of contamination, and it could take decades to eliminate these invisible threats from the land.

Edwards, who is now based in Mykolaiv, is the former Australian Ambassador to Ukraine, said: “Our CEO has described landmines as the ‘eternal vigilant sentry’ and no better is that demonstrated in the likes of Angola, one of our largest programs.

“In Cambodia, in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka … still we’re seeing deaths and inaccessibility due to these wars that for many people will be far, far from their memory.”