Nations throughout history have utilized underground spaces to conceal and protect a wide variety of structures, facilities, and activities from discovery. Historical examples shown below include the Cu Chi Tunnels of the Vietnam War and the North Korean Invasion Tunnels beneath the DMZ.

In today's world, enemies recognize the superior technological capabilities of the U.S. in the areas of reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence gathering. As such, these enemies, both nation states and terrorist organizations, are increasingly working to thwart detection by concealing their facilities and activities below ground. Recent examples shown below include Al Qaeda training facilities and Iran's attempt to conceal nuclear weapon's related facilities.

In addition, the industrialized world has extensive active and inactive underground infrastructure to accommodate mining, bulk storage, communications, transportation, utilities, and sewage and storm runoff. For example, in New York City there are over 6,000 miles of storm sewers, of which, about 70% could theoretically be accessed by humans. These openings could be used for a variety of terrorist and/or unconventional warfare attacks.

The detection (is something there?), characterization (man-made vs. natural feature, size/volume, geology, etc.), and identification (what is intended use?) of underground openings have become critical to our national security. The CGI has established a partnership with the School of Materials, Energy and Earth Resources at the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR), formerly the Missouri School of Mines. UMR is internationally known for its expertise in underground engineering. The CGI and UMR are engaged in research to develop technical protocols for evaluation of underground installations by remote means. The protocols will utilize remote sensing data (seismic, thermal, hyperspectral, etc.) and other geospatial information and intelligence for the detection and characterization underground openings.

In addition, we are also developing a prototype virtual geotechnical database that is geospatially registered in the x, y and z axes and can store unlimited quantities of subsurface data and information. The geotechnical database can be accessed via an Internet portal using a GIS format with on-the-fly data streaming from multiple data source agencies. The goal of this effort is to enable near-instantaneous retrieval of large volumes of sub-surface information for use in geospatial intelligence applications involving the detection, characterization, and inventory of underground structures.