History
’Nalunaq’ is the Greenlandic name of Greenland’s first gold mine and means ‘the place that is hard to find’.
The opening of Nalunaq IN 2004 was a milestone for Greenland, being its first gold mine and the first new mine to be developed in the country for over 30 years.
The mine is located in Kirkespirdalen (Church steeple valley) near the town of Nanortalik.in the southernmost tip of Greenland and is a Proterozoic narrow-vein, high-grade gold deposit.
The terrain is a glacial valley with mountain peaks reaching 1,200-1,600 m above sea level. There is a river, fed by mountain streams of melting snow that runs to the fjord some 20 km to the west.
Nalunaq mountain, which hosts the gold deposit, is 1,340 m high and is located in a wide glacial valley reaching into the Saqqa Fjord about 9 km from the mine site.
Transportation to Nalunaq takes approximately 2.5 hours by fast boat from the international airport at Narsarsuaq. Deep fjords allow access for shipping and the overall climate is sub arctic allowing full access around the year.
In 2004 the mining company Crew Gold Corporation (“Crew”) was granted a licence to exploit the gold deposit at Nalunaq. The license covers an area of 16 km² around the mine site.
Before commencing mining operations, Crew completed over 30,000 metres of diamond drilling and established that the gold is in a quartz intrusion in a granite like host rock. The structure is quite uniform with the quartz varying in thickness from 0.75 metre to 1.5 metres but the gold distribution is not evenly dispersed. Production commenced in mid-2004 and continued until the end of 2008. Over the period, Crew completed more than 19,000 metres of tunnelling and produced 308,000 ounces of gold.
They operated the mine with sub-contract miners from Canada and, as they had no licence to process on site, they shipped mined ore to Newfoundland for processing. Rising oil prices and shipping costs made the economics progressively more difficult.