Supplementary Materials to \"Global Magnitude-Frequency Statistics of the Failures and Impacts of Large Water-Retention Dams and Mine Tailings Impoundments\"

The failures of engineered dams that retain freshwater or mining waste (tailings) have led to socioeconomic and environmental consequences. However, the global magnitude-frequency statistics of these occurrences remain poorly quantified, out-of-date and/or limited in scope. Addressing this gap would give insight into how the hazard-risk of water-retention (reservoir) dams and mine tailings impoundments has evolved over time, and would provide quantitative benchmarks for estimating likelihoods of facility failures and their societal impacts to support risk assessments. In this journal publication, we analyze new datasets and estimates of the construction and failures of large reservoir facilities (LRFs) and tailings storage facilities (TSFs) worldwide in the period 1965-2020. We address long-standing data gaps on LRF failures in China, and subsequently worldwide, and on constructed TSFs worldwide by adopting multiple estimation/extrapolation approaches to illustrate the range of uncertainty in our results. Our results are applicable broadly on a global scale and are conditioned by uncertainties in the data and the methods used to address data gaps. This Borealis Dataset, created under the CanBreach Data Archive umbrella, contains supplementary materials to the Related Publication in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. The files include the following: (i) A new database of TSF failures in the period 1965-2020 including new information such as location coordinates, altitude, and surface area; (ii) A detailed calculation sheet that outlines the conversion process from global mineral commodity production data to the estimated volume of tailings produced worldwide in the period 1965-2020 to the estimated number of TSFs constructed worldwide over the same period based on an upper- and lower-bound extrapolation approach; (ii) A new, incomplete database of historical LRF failures, including a summary calculation sheet that outlines how the upper- and lower-bound estimates of the number of LRF failures worldwide in the period 1965-2020 were developed; (iii) A supplementary article that describes the supplementary databases, includes the supplementary figures relevant to the journal publication, and includes the link to the open-access Google Drive folder that contains GIS-processed satellite and aerial images for many historical TSF and LRF failure cases; and (iv) Google Earth KMZ files that identifies the locations of historically failed TSFs and maps the impoundment surface areas.