Our senior engineering geologist, Danny Lusardi, was on a busman's holiday last week on the west Ireland coast line. While on a touring holiday, enjoying the climate, scenery and liquid refreshment of Ireland, he stumbled across an old Lead and Silver mine in Connemara and couldn't help himself, dragging his long suffering fiance with him!!.
The majority of rocks in Connemara were formed 850 million years ago on the bed of an ancient sea called the Iapetus Ocean. When this finally closed, due to subduction, during the Taconic Orogeny (approximately 450 million years ago), these sea-bed sediments were squashed and folded upwards to form the metamorphic rocks seen in Connemara today. During and after this process super saturated fluids flowed through the fissures and joints in the rocks, depositing all sorts of minerals from galena to silver, gold to fluorite. These minerals have been exploited from 1850 up to the present day in this area.
Here at Geo-Integrity we all have a passion and real interest in the ground, site investigations and the processes that are at work to create the environments we live in (both natural and man-made). This helps us create accurate ground models that can ensure your development is properly designed, understanding all the risks and opportunities that are present on your site.
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