Mineralization in Leveäniemi consists mainly of magnetite, with some hematite, and can be divided into two distinct bodies. The western body consists of two relatively planar zones, typically 25-50 meters thick, dipping roughly 65 degrees towards the east. The Eastern zone is more planar and of higher grade and thickness (Bradley, 2014).

The ore in the Svappavaara field's active open-pit mine, Leveäniemi, is extracted by mining the ore in descending levels. The thickness of the slabs, known as the bench height, is 15 metres, and the slabs are worked downwards.

In the first stage, the ore is extracted at one level before moving down a step (15 metres), after which the ore is removed from the underlying level. The slab is then located between the two levels. Vertical holes are drilled from the upper level, which are charged with explosive and then blasted. The ore is removed from the lower level and the process is then repeated at the next level down.

In order to expose the ore and ensure safe walls, the surrounding rock around the ore has to be removed. The surrounding rock is removed before the ore at the same level can be mined. Bench mining is an effective and well established mining method, which allows maximum extraction from the rock with a high degree of safety.

In Svappavaara ore is mined in the Leveäniemi open-pit mine.

Svappavaara has a sorting plant, a concentrating plant and a pelletising plant.

Sorting is a dry process in which the ore is crushed and screened in order to magnetically separate types of rock that are not iron ore. The iron content in the crushed ore is increased from approximately 45 percent to around 62 percent.

In the concentrating plants the crushed ore goes through several stages of grinding and magnetic separation using water in order to release and remove impurities before the concentrated product (slurry) goes on to the processing plants to be made into pellets. The iron content has then increased from around 62 percent to around 68 percent.

In the pelletising plant the slurry is filtered and a binder (bentonite) is added before the iron ore concentrate is rolled into 10-millimetre pellet balls. The pellets are dried, preheated, sintered and then cooled down before being transported to a storage silo for onward transport by rail to the ports of Narvik and Luleå.