Collège Boréal’s Prospecting and Mining Exploration program in Sudbury got a lift this week when the Sudbury-based mining service company CoreLift donated a prototype automated core-logging table to the school.
The company has created a unique mechanical table that can be raised, lowered, tilted and rotated to let geologists and other workers get easy access to heavy boxes of core samples that indicate what minerals have been discovered by drilling.
Core samples are pieces of cylindrical rock extracted from exploration diamond drills. A handful of core samples can easily weigh a couple of kilograms. A full box of the rocky samples can weigh 25 kilograms or more. That’s a challenge if one is lifting and examining rock samples all day, when each piece of rock must be examined and catalogued.
While an individual diamond drilling operation might see workers handling a handful of core boxes each day, it’s different in a full geoscience lab where workers are handling hundreds of core boxes.
That kind of heavy lifting can result in injuries and repetitive strain.
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