Engineering Rock Mechanics

16 Geological setting

Figure 2.3 Rock slopes: (a) at the A82 roadside near Loch Lomond in Scotland; (b)
forming one side of the New Celebration open-pit gold mine in Western Australia.

opportunity to alter the location of the road to suit the rock engineering.
Similarly, in mining engineering, the purpose of the mine is to extract
the ore, which is in a specific location. The slopes in the gold mine in
Fig. 2.3b are determined by the orebody geometry and economics. The
large scale of this operation can be seen by the vehicles on the lowest
level.
The type of failure on the roadside rock face shown in Fig. 2.3a, where
instability was caused by pre-existing fractures forming a rock wedge,
can also occur on a large scale, as illustrated in Fig. 2.4. In this case,