The Labrador Trough consists of Paleoproterozoic sedimentary and volcanic rocks, which extend along the eastern margin of the Archean Superior Craton to Ungava Bay. It forms the western part of a larger orogenic belt called the New Québec Orogen. In southwestern Labrador, the Labrador Trough extends into the younger Grenville Province, where the sedimentary rocks were deformed and metamorphosed.

Iron-ore deposits in the Labrador Trough are hosted in the Sokoman Formation, which sits toward the top of the shelf sequence, above a thick package of shale, dolostones, and siliciclastic rocks. The Sokoman Formation consists of a 30–170-m-thick sequence of cherty iron-rich sediments, and is continuous for 250 km from Labrador City to Schefferville; it also continues into Québec in both directions, and is one of the most extensive iron formations known on Earth. North of the Grenville Province, the stratigraphic sequence is largely intact, and the position and distribution of the Sokoman Formation are very predictable. Parts of this area experienced low-grade (greenschist facies) metamorphism and open to tight folding, but in the western foreland, the rocks are gently dipping and essentially undisturbed. In the southern part of the Labrador Trough, the rocks are highly metamorphosed and complexly folded, but the essential stratigraphy of the Kaniapiskau Supergroup remains discernable, albeit structurally disrupted. The productive unit in this area is locally known as the ........

Mining is carried out using open pit techniques, which involve the drilling, blasting and hauling of waste rock and ore. Broken ore is loaded by electric shovels and transported by truck to either the Automatic Train Operation (ATO) or the Parallel Ore Delivery System (PODS). The ATO system consists of four underground loading pockets where the as-mined ore is transferred from mine haul trucks to unmanned automatic trains. The automatic trains carry broken ore from the loading pockets to a crusher located adjacent to IOC’s processing facilities, a distance of between 8 and 12 kilometres from the loading pockets. The PODS consists of a gyratory crusher located adjacent to the Luce Pit and an overland conveyor. The conveyor carries crushed ore a distance of 6 kilometres to the concentrator. Given current downstream constraints, the mine and the automatic train and conveyor have a nominal capacity to deliver up to 55 million tonnes per annum of ore to the concentrator. This number would be slightly higher without existing capacity constraints at the concentrator.

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