The Beta Hunt orebody is situated on the south western limb of the Kambalda dome. It is one of the nickel occurrences in the area which fall into the category of Kambalda Style Orebodies'. These orebodies are renowned as being continuous uniformly mineralised ribbons of nickel sulfide mineralisation. Interestingly, Beta Hunt does not conform to this notion of continuity and uniformity and is in fact highly irregular in its ore distribution due largely to the influence of post depositional structure._x000D_
In an attempt to understand the ore distribution at delineation stage rather than development stage a detailed footwall topography model is created using all available drilling data. To augment this drilling data, the routine use of downhole EM and borehole radar has been introduced to provide data beyond the confines of the drill core to enhance the geological interpretation of the footwall topography and the distribution of the mineralisation._x000D_
The implementation of a detailed footwall model and the use of downhole geophysics has proved to be very effective in resolving the orebody complexity issues. Ongoing development of the methods used will continue to refine the interpretation of the geology to enable more efficient extraction of the orebody._x000D_
FORMAL CITATION:Banasik, C and Crameri, K P, 2006. Managing geological complexity - Beta Hunt Mine, Kambalda, Western Australia, in Proceedings Sixth International Mining Geology Conference, pp 23-28 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).