The 10th International Congress for Applied Mineralogy was held in Trondheim from 1 – 5th August, also marking the 30 year history of ICAM. The previous meeting had been held in Brisbane in Sept 2008 and was an unprecedented success with over 200 people attending and some exciting and controversial papers. An interesting concept at this year’s congress was the ‘guided poster session’ - All presenters of papers also had to present a poster - and in this session each presenter was allowed one minute to tell the audience about the work. The session was run strictly with a bell and after which delegates were free to continue discussions as desired. It worked really well and plenty of discussion ensued.A theme of the conference was climate change and its effect on exploration of the Artic as well carbon capture - with a keynote address advocating the use of finely ground olivine - of course discussion ensued re the use of mine tailings for carbon sequestration. A technical tour included the visit to famous Nidaroscathedral , which started construction in 1070 - out of soapstone! See pic of Dee checking the Mohs hardness (1) at an allowed location!
Four participants from the JKMRC attended , all with various roles;
• Dr Ying Gu as the outgoing President of the Council opened the conference and at the committee meeting on Wednesday night handed over his presidency to Dr Maarten Broekmans from the Norwegian Geological Survey.
• Two day pre-conference workshop on ‘Particle Tracking’ was given by Dr Sergio Vianna and Professor Perrti Lamberg of Geometallurgy at Lulea University in Sweden.
• Richard Hartner a PhD student from the AMIRA P843 presenting his work and Dee Bradshaw presenting two papers and co-authoring another presented by Mike Macdonald of Rio Tinto.