The Meliadine gold project is located in the Archean Rankin Inlet Greenstone Belt, in the Churchill Structural Province of the northern Canadian Shield. This belt consists of mafic volcanic rocks, felsic pyroclastic rocks, sedimentary rocks and gabbro sills of about 2.7 billion years old that have been polydeformed and metamorphosed. The Meliadine trend is defined by northwest-trending rock units as well as a major fault zone known as the Pyke Fault: a high-strain zone characterized by multiple foliations and regionally important shear zones.

The Meliadine gold district comprises a combination of orogenic greenstone- and banded iron formation (“BIF”) hosted gold mineralization. Gold in the district is associated with hydrothermally altered and sulphidized BIF (Lawley, et al., 2013).

Seven gold deposits have been identified at the Meliadine project, of which Tiriganiaq is the most significant. The other deposits are the Discovery, F zone, Wesmeg, Normeg, Wolf and Pump. The Normeg deposit, discovered in 2012, is a southern expansion of the Tiriganiaq deposit, and extends as far as the Wesmeg deposit. Gold mineralization in these seven deposits is mostly mesothermal quartz-vein-dominated gold systems in strongly sheared and complexly folded host rocks of Archean turbidites, iron formation and volcanic rocks. Within each deposit are many gold-bearing lodes of quartz vein stockwork, laminated veins and sulphidized iron formation with strike lengths of up to ........

Mining at Meliadine will be carried out through ten open pits and two underground mining operations. Underground access is by decline, with long-hole mining methods. Each stope is backfilled, with cemented pastefill and/or cemented rockfill used in primary stopes and dry rockfill for the secondary stopes. A conventional truck/shovel operation is used for the open pits. Mining in 2021 occurred by both underground and open pit at Tiriganiaq.

An underground portal allowing access to an exploration ramp was built at the Tiriganiaq deposit in 2007 and 2008 to extract a bulk sample for study purposes. This ramp now provides access for services, underground activities and personnel transportation. The construction of a second portal was completed in 2018. The main purpose of this second portal is for production activities, including bringing ore to the crusher feeding the mill.

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During development, more than 39 metallurgical test programs were conducted at Meliadine. Based on the results of these tests, a conventional gold circuit was built, comprising crushing, grinding, gravity separation and cyanide leaching, with a CIL circuit, followed by cyanide destruction and filtration of the tailings for dry stacking. The mill was completed in early in 2019 and has a name-plate capacity of 3,750 tonnes per day.

A summary description of processing at Meliadine is provided below (Technical Report, 2015).
The process plant will consist of three separate facilities:
- a crushing facility, including primary and related material-handling facilities that can crush ore from either underground or open pit operations;
- a main processing facility including a coarse ore surge bin and related feeding and reclaim systems, grinding, gravity concentration and an intensive leaching reactor, leaching feed thickening, CIL cyanide circuit, loaded carbon acid ........