Slope Design for Maricunga Mine in Chile

Kinross Gold Corporation has several porphyry/epithermal gold properties in Maricunga gold belt in northern Chile. The Maricunga site comprises the operating Verde pit and the Pancho deposit, currently under development. Currently active operations are all open pits mines of a medium scale, and have experienced varying degrees of geotechnical difficulties due to the highly altered and fractured nature of the rock mass. Kinross is currently conducting, at a feasibility engineering level, the Maricunga Mine Slope Optimization. A geomechanical assessment is being carried out to evaluate the wall stability of the final open pits at Verde and Pancho. To evaluate the mechanical stability of the open pits, a series of field work and geomechanical studies have been performed. These studies involved, among others, slope stability analyses based on limit equilibrium methods and numerical modeling. This paper describes the analysis methodology for the slope design applied to the optimization project.