Clearing mines from a Sarajevo airport in 1996. Courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Paul Grabhorn.

Before any mine detection simulations could be run, however, El-Shenawee had to cajole the simulated sensory waves to get under the surface. The first computational tangle in this challenge was modeling the soil's surface itself. Looking at the surface of soil, she found that the character of the dirt was not uniform. "Here it could be smoother, there rougher," she says. To accommodate this natural occurrence, El-Shenawee adapted her ocean surface simulations so the model could take in all the possible combinations of soil's hills and valleys.

Deminer working in a suspected Sarajevo minefield in 1997. Courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Ian Woodmansey.

Compounding the problem was the fact that getting this true picture of the soil's character required running the same simulation over and over again. "If we run it once, the result means little," she says. "We have to run it many times and take the average. Then what you get is useful information."

Once the surface was modeled, she then had to extend the representation deep into the ground, essentially building a three-dimensional column of dirt. Next, she modeled the different types of sensory waves as they entered and bounced off of the soil's surface. By extending those simulations down the column, much as she created the column in the first place, she developed a model that showed how those waves bounced along deep inside the soil.