Open Pit Mine Design

Prof. Garston Blackwell

Blackwell is a tenured full professor of mining engineering at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. He graduated from the Camborne School of Mines in 1968, and after working for Falconbridge Nickel Mines in Sudbury for three years, obtained his M.Sc. degree from Queen’s, and joined Brenda Mines in British Columbia.

At Brenda he was responsible for wall stability, pit dewatering and short term mine planning, and after working as a shift supervisor, become chief engineer in 1978. He installed one of the earliest mine-site multi-user computers for slope stability monitoring, grade control, ore reserve estimation, mine production databases and short/long range mine planning, all with software written in-house.

In 1986 Blackwell joined Queen’s University as associate professor of mining engineering, building the department computer laboratory, and teaching operations research, geostatistics, open pit mining, ore-body modeling and mine surveying as well as undergraduate thesis supervision. He has presented industrial courses in open pit mining at many mine sites as well as at Queen’s on a regular basis. He took industry funded one year leaves of absence to work in engineering and management at Barrick Goldstrike in Nevada, and Battle Mountain Gold in Chile.

He won the CIM metal mining award in 2005, Golden Apple teaching awards at Queen’s in 2003 and 1999, and the
fellowship of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum in 1995. Blackwell has served as chair of the CIM metal mining division, and was technical chairman of the CIM AGM Montreal 2003. In 2006 he was a member of the geotechnical review board for CODELCO North in Chile, and was a member of the CSIRO review board in Brisbane and Perth Australia.