The Murowa Diamond deposit consists of a cluster of five kimberlite pipes and dykes. The pipes, labelled K1 to K5, lie between two structural features with a North-South trend (Figure 2). To the West is a doleritic dyke and to the east is a major shear zone.

The K1 pipe is considered to be part of a complex blow along a North-South system of kimberlite dykes of which the smaller K3, K4 and K5 bodies are a part of the local controls on K1 are of North-South orientation. However K2’s emplacement was more directly controlled by a reactivation along the shear zone.

The shape of the pipe of the K2 pipe, the eastern side of which is in direct contact with the shear, and the western wall which dips away to the west, is an inverted wedge. This shape is unusual for a kimberlite pipe and it is said almost certainly to result from a structural preparation of the ground. Detailed observation of some dyke contacts with the granite on the western side of K2 indicate that there was indeed some reactivation along the quartz shear occurring at the time of emplacement.

The geology of the Murowa kimberlite pipes is complex comprising of inter-mixing of kimberlite lithologies and different phases of emplacement. The country rock is veined, brecciated and/or metasomatised and fenitised with kimberlitic fluid phases at the kimberlite pipe contact (Moss, 2010). The K1 pipe (the main focus of this study) is modelled as a complex, steep sided multi-lobed kimberlite pipe. The contact zones around K1 vary in thickness, overall rock textures and the relative proportion of kimberlitic components.

The Murowa Diamonds is a small-scale, efficient open cast diamond mining operation, producing around 400,000 carats per annum.

A truck and shovel method is used to extract ore from the two open pipes. The waste is drilled and blasted and trucked away using dump trucks. This leaves the ore available for extraction, which is crushed, processed and pumped to the final recovery plant.