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Golden Queen Mining Company‘ s Soledad Mountain Project is a narrow vein-hosted gold/silver deposit. Senior geologist, Sara Holden, describes how, during their first year of mining, the ore control team implemented blast movement monitoring to control ore loss and dilution.

Blast movement monitors are installed at mid-bench locations. Post-blast, the horizontal movement vectors are calculated, and ore polygons are translated to their new locations.

In one example blast, the entire ore block moved by 4.5 –10.5 ft. This displacement without tracking would have resulted in  3% (~4,000 tons) ore loss as a result of ore moving into a waste block. The overall increase in recovered value from this blast was at US $69,195.

The long term results indicate an improvement in reconciliation of 7 – 13%.