Mineral resource and ore reserve classification defines the risk associated with quoted resource tonnes and grades, allowing the interested party to make a judgement as to the ‘worth’ of the resource statement. The JORC Code and Guidelines (1992) are now well entrenched as the foundation upon which gold and base metal deposits in particular are publicly reported. There are three categories of resource, namely Measured, Indicated or Inferred reflecting decreasing levels of confidence. The ore reserve, that is the economically mineable part of the resource, is classified as Proven or Probable and can only be drawn from the Measured and Indicated resource categories. <...>

We tend to think of rock engineering as a modern discipline and yet, as early as 1773, Coulomb included results of tests on rocks from Bordeaux in a paper read before the French Academy in Paris (Coulomb, 1776, Heyman, 1972). French engineers started construction of the Panama Canal in 1884 and this task was taken over by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1908. In the half century between 1910 and 1964, 60 slides were recorded in cuts along the canal and, although these slides were not analysed in rock mechanics terms, recent work by the US Corps of Engineers (Lutton et al, 1979) shows that these slides were predominantly controlled by structural discontinuities and that modern rock mechanics concepts are fully applicable to the analysis of these failures. In discussing the Panama Canal slides in his Presidential Address to the first international conference on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering in 1936, Karl Terzaghi (Terzaghi, 1936, Terzaghi and Voight, 1979) said ‘The catastrophic descent of the slopes of the deepest cut of the Panama Canal issued a warning that we were overstepping the limits of our ability to predict the consequences of our actions ....’. <...>

This modern introduction to seismic data processing in both exploration and global geophysics demonstrates practical applications through real data and tutorial examples. The underlying physics and mathematics of the various seismic analysis methods are presented, giving students an appreciation of their limitations and potential for creating models of the subsurface. Designed for a one-semester course, this textbook discusses key techniques within the context of the world’s ever-increasing need for petroleum and mineral resources – equipping upper undergraduate and graduate students with the tools they need for a career in industry.