The Meadowbank property comprises a number of Archean-age gold deposits hosted within polydeformed volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Woodburn Lake Group, part of the Western Churchill supergroup in northern Canada.

Three mineable gold deposits, Goose, Portage and Vault (all now mined out), have been discovered along the 25-kilometre long Meadowbank gold trend, and the PDF deposit (a fourth deposit) has been outlined on the northeast gold trend. These known gold resources were within 225 metres of the surface, making the deposits amenable to open pit mining. In addition, two mineable deposits have been discovered at the Amaruq satellite deposit, the Whale Tail and V Zone, which come together at depth northeast of Whale Tail Lake. Both extend from surface, making them amenable to open pit mining. A ramp is being driven between the two deposits and is currently 350 metres below surface, in the footwall of Whale Tail deposit.

The main mineralized occurrences at Amaruq are hosted within a northeast-trending sequence of mafic and ultramafic sub-volcanic to volcanic rocks interlayered with various combinations of fine-grained clastic rocks, chert, graphitic iron-rich mudstone and iron formation. They correspond to mesothermal-type lode-gold mineralization, including (but not restricted to) hybrid, stratiform and vein-type iron-formation-hosted gold deposits.

Mineralization
The Amaruq satellite deposit at Meadowbank is located 50 kilometre ........

The Meadowbank Complex includes the Meadowbank mine and the Amaruq satellite deposit. Mining concluded at the Meadowbank site in 2019. Mining was done by open pit method using excavators and trucks.

All ore at the Meadowbank Complex is now sourced from the Amaruq satellite deposit at Meadowbank. Mining at the Amaruq satellite deposit is by open pit methods using excavators and trucks. The ore is extracted conventionally using drilling and blasting, then hauled by a long haul off-road truck fleet to the mill at the Meadowbank facilities for processing

Commercial production was achieved on September 30, 2019 at the Whale Tail pit. The V Zone (IVR pit) began pre stripping activities in the third quarter of 2020 and achieved commercial production on December 31, 2020.

Pit design
The pit shells produced with the Lerchs-Grossmann algorithm were used as a guideline for the pit designs where mining takes place on 7-m-high benches with a final bench height of 21 m. To maximize the ore recovery and minimize dilution, the 7 m benches will be split-benched and mined in two 3.5-m lifts in ore zones. The pit design includes ramp access to reach the bottom of both open pits. The ramp widths are set to 28.0 m at a gradient of 10%. The ramp width decreases to 21.0 m for single-lane traffic at the pit bottom (last five benches) and the gradient has been increased to 12% for the last three benches in order to reduce stripping. The ramp width includes a p ........

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The process design at the Meadowbank mill consists of two-stage crushing, grinding, gravity concentration, cyanide leaching and gold recovery in a CIP circuit. Gold-plated cathodes and gravity concentrate are smelted in an induction furnace and poured as doré bars.

The mill was designed to operate year-round, with an annual design capacity of 3.1 million tonnes (8,500 tonnes per day). The addition of a secondary crusher in 2011 increased the overall capacity in the mill to 3.6 million tonnes processed per year (9,840 tonnes per day). Since the installation of the secondary crusher, the plant has consistently exceeded 8,500 tonnes per day. Significant metallurgical testing has been conducted on samples from the Amaruq satellite deposit since 2014 to confirm its amenability to processing at the Meadowbank mill and the Meadowbank mill successfully processed ore from both Whale Tail and V Zone deposits in 2020.

The ore from the Amaruq satellite deposit at Meadowbank i ........