Back in late 2019, in those innocent pre-pandemic days when "social distancing" wasn't a virtue, Mo Srivastava couldn't believe his good luck when his colleague, Alan Lambden, made the mistake of saying that he wanted to learn all the administration ropes that Mo had been keeping on his side of the office. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, or give someone a second chance to back out of a bad offer, Mo said "tag, you're it" ... and so RedDot3D was born. Alan now has to fit the joys of contracts, invoices, proposals, promotion, CRA, payroll, banking, websites, business cards, office space, insurance and sub-contractors into the time that remains after he's done all of his "real" work as a professional geologist. And Mo gets to think deep thoughts about data and geology, focusing on technical work, knowing that Alan ... God bless his Irish soul ... keeps the administrative wheels turning while still being part of the all-hands-on-deck crew that handles the technical work that pays the bills.
.png)
Our project assignments range from a few hours on a brief memo to several months on a major report. Typical of a short project is a few hours working with a lawyer to explain technical issues and the associated jargon. Our longest assignment to date has been coordinating the PEA studies for a rare earths project, organizing colleagues to handle the mining and process studies, and writing the 43-101 report ... four months, with lots of late nights and early mornings, collaborating with a client and contractors across four time zones.
We occasionally work individually, but more often work together, tag-teaming with technical assistance to each other and with technical direction as needed.
We're happy to being an extra pair of hands for a client, and equally happy to roll up our sleeves and do all the work ourselves. We're good teachers and trainers; no qualms at all about making ourselves redundant by helping others learn the tricks of the trade.
We're always willing to put boots on the ground. Still haven't lost our fascination with the planet's wilderness, or the satisfaction of spitting on core. Clients are welcome to join us in our Toronto office for one-on-one training that focuses on the specific needs of their project.
Alan Lambden (B.Sc., M.Sc., P.Geo.)
Alan has degrees in Geology from the National University of Ireland at Galway and in Applied Geology from Queen's University in Canada. He has more than 20 years of experience on base metal, precious metal and rare earth deposits, from early grassroots exploration, through advanced exploration and into production. He has worked in projects in Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, the Yukon, Northern Ontario and Newfoundland.
Alan is proficient with major commercial mining software systems, as well as with software for statistical data analysis and interpretation, GIS and video editing. When he needs software tools that have not yet been implemented in commercial software, he has written his own code in Basic, VBA for Excel and in the PostScript visual display language.
Alan co-designed the resource estimation course for Queen's University's online BTech program, and has served as the online instructor for this course since 2019. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches their undergraduate course in mineral resource estimation.
His skills in video editing have led to several assignments that benefit from animated and dynamic presentations, not only in his work in academia, but also for mining companies looking for new and engaging ways to tell the story of their project. In 2019, he MacGyvered a simple and inexpensive projection pyramid for holographic-like 3D visualizations, selected by PDAC as one of the Exhibitor Spotlights at their Annual Convention that year.
R. Mohan Srivastava (B.Sc., M.Sc., P.Geo.)
Mo Srivastava has been a geologist for 46 years and a geostatistician for 43 of those. He has degrees in Earth Sciences from MIT and in Geostatistics from Stanford University. He is the author of An Introduction to Applied Geostatistics, the go-to textbook that has helped many resource estimation specialists take their first steps in geostatistics.
Since the late 1980s, he has worked as a consultant, teaching and applying geostatistics on a wide variety of projects in the mining industry, the petroleum industry and on environmental studies, including climate change. His clients have included private and public companies, governments, NGOs and individuals. He has worked on every continent ... except Antarctica, but would love to take the methods he developed for counting alligators in Florida and see if it also works on penguins.
In the mining industry, he has worked on base and precious metals deposits, on industrial minerals and on coal deposits. He served for six years as the Vice President for TriStar Gold. During his time with TriStar, their mineral resource grew by a factor of 7x through the drilling programs he guided and the technical studies he led. He advises companies on public disclosure, audits resource models for mergers and acquisitions, develops and monitors QA/QC programs for assay quality, builds resource block models and writes 43-101 technical reports.
Mo has run public short courses, taught in universities at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and been on industry panel discussions and podcasts hosted by The Northern Miner. He is the 2016 recipient of the Award of Merit from the Professional Geoscientists of Ontario for lifetime contributions to geosciences.
He is the same Mohan Srivastava (you'd be surprised how many there are!) who broke the lottery, and who won the CBC Canada Writes Award for Non-Fiction. He is also the person after whom the MoFrac software system is named ... a tad embarrassed by that name having been chosen (and mercilessly mocked by his kids for it), but also proud of having hatched a good idea for fracture modeling and for having done the proof-of-concept studies for Canada's nuclear waste management program.