Last week was a busy one for Orefind. After putting the final touches to the website Orefind personnel winged their way to the mining mecca of Kalgoorlie for the AIG Structural Geology and Resources Symposium. The last time this event was held was in 2002 and Brett led an oversold field trip around the Scotia-Kanowna Dome for that symposium. As such, the 2012 event was a great occasion to reacquaint with old friends, meet new ones, and to argue somewhat vociferously with other delegates.
Orefind had a big presence at the 2012 symposium. As with the 2002 event, Brett was on the organising committee. In addition, both Brett and Jun gave presentations, Orefind was a major sponsor as well as having a booth, and Brett chaired most of the final day of proceedings.
Orefind's stainless steel water bottles were popular with the young female geologists who turned out in full force for this conference (here seen with Linda Ridge of Orefind)
Talks were of a generally high quality, although some unnamed presenters would be better off learning how give public presentations instead of wasting our time (if you are reading this then you know who you are, and your talks were abysmal!). Some people just don’t seem to get it – they waffle, go over time, mutter about parochial little things that the audience has no idea about, and generally waste the audience’s time. It is a reflection of tolerance of some of the chairpersons of these sessions that the really bad speakers were not booted off the stage when they should have been.
Thankfully, the better talks were more plentiful and old favourites such as Greg Corbett, Steve Cox, Bruce Hobbs, Dick Todsdal, Steffan Hagemann etc did not disappoint. Debate was commonly lively and it was fun to watch animated discussions between people such as Jun and Howard Poulsen. Thankfully, no one got taken out to the carpark and rolled in the bindies and civility was the winner outside of session times. Its nice to know that the old debates regarding the contribution of structure, or otherwise, to certain styles of mineralisation, are still alive and kicking.
Richard Blewett (Geoscience Australia), Steffen Hagemann (UWA) and Brett Davis
Prof. Bruce Hobbs (UWA) and Jun Cowan discuss the music of Miles Davis and a bit of geology
There was a mountain of feedback regarding Brett’s talk on oriented core and the foibles of data collection. It is an unfortunate fact, but most of the people in the audience had horror stories regarding the issues of core orientation. Most of the people who came to the Orefind booth to chat about core orientation issues wanted a copy of Brett’s presentation. For this reason, the presentation will be placed on the Orefind website for download.
Sarah Jones (St Barbara) with Gavi Pestonji and Brett Davis of Orefind at the symposium dinner
The social events organised for the symposium were great. Beer and pizza at the core library was a winner, as was the symposium dinner in the Boulder town hall. Unfortunately, the revelry and structural partying came to an end too soon and now we are all back at work, and I am finishing this blog here. Until next time, thanks for visiting the website!
Our next post: Is sectional digitisation in geological modelling still considered "industry best practice"?