Delivering professional training for Mount Isa Mines

Professor Tom Blenkinsop and postgraduate research student Ben Williams delivered a workshop for geologists from Mount Isa Mines in Australia.

Mount Isa is the home of Australia’s second largest producing copper mine as well as one of the largest silver-lead-zinc deposits in the world. The area around the mine for several hundred square kilometres is regarded as highly prospective for copper deposits, which can be combined with other valuable elements such as gold and iron.

Professor Blenkinsop and Alex Brown (Senior Geologist from Mount Isa Mines), who have many years’ experience conducting field work in the region, led a group of seven geologists from Mount Isa Mines on a field course earlier this year in a spectacular area of the outback to learn advanced techniques of looking at mineralised rocks.

The field course was followed up by a workshop organised by Pat Ila'Ava at Mount Isa and delivered by Cardiff University PhD student Ben and Professor Blenkinsop. Details of the possible controls on the Isan ore bodies were discussed with fourteen Mount Isa Mine geology and mining staff.

Ben’s PhD study is aimed at understanding the formation of the copper ore bodies and is benefitting from supervision by Cardiff University Exploration and Resource Geology alumnus Richard Lilly, now a Mount Isa Mines embedded research fellow at Adelaide University.

Some of the material in the workshop will feature in a free online open access course entitled “Structural Geology for the Exploration and Mining Industry” developed by Professor Blenkinsop to be launched on the FutureLearn platform later this year.