As someone with a metal detector, those things are incredibly sensitive. A gold coin and an aluminium can pull tab both pretty much give the same signal. I'd imagine that finding mines with just that would be incredibly inefficient since it's going to be mostly just false alarms and metal is everywhere. Some new version I heard about combined metal detector with a ground penetrating radar of some sort and that thing gave much better results.

[–] MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Erring on the side of caution is preferable in this case.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Oh sure. What I meant to highlight there is the sheer amount of work that's needed to clear these lands of mines. Currently that pretty much means dividing the ground into 1 x 1 meter grid and going square by square.

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sensitivity on the crappy metal detector I have can be adjusted.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah ferrous metals give a different signal that copper, bronze or aluminium. I'd imagine mines contain all kinds of metals so you can probably ignore some of the signals. Though then there's also those tiny bomblets that I think have no metal in them whatsoever and detonate from the pressure of your feet.