Sean Daly has a BSc in Geology and an M.Eng. in Mining Engineering from the University of British Columbia in western Canada. He has over 40 years of intensive hands-on field experience. This includes geological mapping for the Geological Survey of Canada, the Ontario Dept of Mines, for mineral exploration projects, underground at a rich silver lead zinc mine in Honduras, and many years doing geotechnical and geological mapping at a large porphyry copper open pit mine in British Columbia. Also, he logged many 1000’s of meters of diamond drill core for both mineral exploration and geotechnical data especially at the above mentioned Highland Valley Copper Mine.
At Highland Valley Copper, for 10 years he was responsible for the slope stability of two large open pits, with special emphasis on toppling failures which predominated in these two pits, but also with experience in plane and wedge failures. He developed his own technique for blast-ability mapping of the rocks and this was applied to make blasting more efficient, for about 15 years and involved a kind of rock mass characterization. He was also trained by a geotechnical engineer mentor on the use of the DIPS program both for analysis of structures and to orient diamond drill core data.
In addition to 19 years of experience at Highland Valley Copper, he has 14 years of contracting/consulting for both geotech work (often for pre-feasibility studies) and for mineral exploration. In this work he learned to size up a geological or geotechnical situation very quickly on rocks in such widely diverse places as Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Mexico, Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, Ireland and Spain.
Lastly, he just finished writing a book about the history of geology and mining since the 1500’s (From the Erzgebirge to Potosi) and it is being published right now. In this book, he traces the relationship between geology and mining and important social and economic world-shaking events like the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. The book includes a review of the famous old mining treatise called De Re Metallica written by Georgius Agricola, a German doctor who began studying mining geology and engineering in a small town he was stationed at in Eastern Germany in the 1500’s. It was the authority on mining for 180 years. His book also includes a large section on the engineering uses of mapping at Highland Valley Copper.