The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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"Grade is king" is an adage that guides mineral exploration and mining. The premise behind this basic axiom of the mining business is the less ore that needs to be mined and processed per ounce of precious metals, pound of base metals, kilogram of critical minerals, or carat of gemstones produced, the more profitable an operation will be. The kingliest of orebodies would be of such high grade that a mining company would simply need to dig up the ore, crush it, and then ship it...
American West Metals Ltd. Aug. 8 reported that strong copper mineralization has been observed in the core from four additional holes drilled at the Storm Copper project on Somerset Island in the northern reaches of Nunavut, Canada. American West optioned Storm and the neighboring Seal Zinc project from Aston Bay Holdings Ltd. early last year. The Australia-based mineral exploration company launched a drill program earlier this year focused on zones of near-surface, high-grade...
Aston Bay Holdings Ltd. shares rocketed 33% on Monday on the news of visual confirmation of strong copper mineralization encountered in the first two holes American West Metals Ltd. drilled this year at Aston's high-grade Storm Copper Project on Somerset Island, Nunavut. Australia-based American West, which optioned Storm and the neighboring Seal Zinc project from Aston Bay early last year, recently launched its first drill program at Storm. The primary objective of this drill...
American West Metals Ltd. June 22 announced plans for its 2022 exploration program at the high-grade Storm Copper and Seal Zinc projects on Somerset Island, Nunavut. Australia-based American West, which optioned Storm and Seal from Aston Bay Holdings Ltd. early last year, plans to launch a major diamond drill program in July to test high-grade copper targets at Storm. One of the primary targets will be to define areas of high-grade copper mineralization with the potential to...
American West Metals Ltd., a junior led by two mining industry veterans from Australia, has returned to the Arctic this year for a second field season in pursuit of rich deposits at the Storm Copper project on Somerset Island in northeastern Nunavut. Storm hosts a 120-kilometer (75 miles) mineralized trend within an extensive 4,145-square-kilometer (1,600 square miles) land package that covers multiple copper and zinc geochemical anomalies along strike. In March 2021,...
A hardener of the steels that have been helping to make Fords tough for more than a century and an element with unique properties that make it the key ingredient in enormous batteries to store intermittent wind- and solar-generated electricity, vanadium is a critical metal with many valences. It is vanadium's chemical valences that make this alloying metal an ideal ingredient in the redox flow batteries that scientists and governments see as the ideal large-scale storage...
May 10, 2022, celebrates the ninth annual Alaska Mining Day. Established in 2013, Alaska Mining Day was created through legislation sponsored by Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, "to recognize and honor the intrepid individuals and industry that played an enormous role in settling and developing the territory and the state that continue to contribute to the economy of the state." Why May 10? On this day in 1872, the General Mining Act of the United States was approved – w...
Fortune Minerals Ltd. April 20 reported that its 2021 drilling cut strong cobalt-gold-bismuth mineralization in the Peanut Lake zone on its Nico project in Canada's Northwest Territories. Nico hosts 33.1 million metric tons of proven and probable reserves averaging 0.11% (82 million pounds) cobalt, 0.14% (110 million lb) bismuth, 0.04% (27 million lb) copper, and 1.03 grams per metric ton (1.1 million ounces) gold. Peanut Lake is a strong magnetic anomaly about 2,000 meters...
While hailing President Joe Biden's use of the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of critical lithium-ion battery minerals and metals as good news for the Far North State's mining sector, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy says this move contradicts actions taken by the administration to reevaluate a road to the Ambler Mining District. "I fully support the President making the development of these minerals a priority in our nation's interest. But the Biden...
Mineral exploration activity in Nunavut intensified in 2021 as mining companies mounted larger and more extensive programs in response to stronger capital markets, government infrastructure initiatives, and the easing of restrictions imposed to curb effects of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Spanning 2 million square kilometers (about 782,000 square miles), the territory has 25 communities and about 39,353 residents, of whom 84% are Inuit. Nunavut has no roads, and all but one...
Engage. Connect. Evolve. – this theme of AME Roundup 2022 is the perfect reflection of a mineral exploration sector that is adapting to a world in which Zoom meetings and webinars must often replace boardroom meetings and live conferences as a means of engaging investors, shareholders, and stakeholders. "As society recovers and evolves from the disruption caused by the global pandemic, so does our industry," said AME President and CEO Kendra Johnston. "At AME Roundup, you w...
Mineral exploration activity in Northwest Territories showed signs of revival in 2021, coming on the heels of the slowest year in recent memory. Excited by renewed interest in gold deposits in and around the capital city of Yellowknife and other hot spots after the pandemic-related restrictions of 2020, juniors joined longtime explorers Nighthawk Gold Corp. and Gold Terra Resource Corp. (formerly TerraX Minerals) in hunting for the yellow metal across the 1.14...
"During the two decades preceding and those following World War I, when the United States produced more than half the world's copper, the mines at Kennecott, Alaska were among the nation's largest, and contained the last of the great high grade copper ore deposits discovered in the American West. Just as mining technology was gearing up to exploit the low-grade ores that remained in the West, the Kennecott mines exposed an ore deposit of quality unequaled anywhere in the...
Home of the famed golden beaches of Nome that has captured the imagination of millions over the past 120 years, the Bering Straits Native Corporation (BSNC) region covers the Seward Peninsula and coastal lands arcing around the eastern and southern coast of the Norton Sound in the far western reaches of Alaska. While this region may be 300 miles beyond North America's highway system, it has served as a crossroads for human activity for at least 15 millennia and will continue...
The Bristol Bay region is home to two resources that beyond a doubt earn the moniker "world-class" – an annual run of sockeye salmon that is second to none and Pebble, the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits known to exist on Earth. These world-renowned resources, however, have stirred up controversy in this Oklahoma-sized region of Southwest Alaska, as many of the roughly 7,400 Bristol Bay residents are concerned that mining the copper, gold, molybdenum, rhenium, and...
Aston Bay Holdings Ltd. Dec. 13 announced that the preliminary results of recent ground electromagnetic geophysical surveys identified numerous conductive anomalies across its high-grade Storm Copper project on Somerset Island, Nunavut. "The initial results of the 2021 geophysical surveys demonstrate the efficacy of ground EM as an exploration tool at Storm, and further reinforce our belief that undiscovered, blind zones of high-grade copper mineralization exist in...
A recent agreement between Vital Metals Ltd. and Ucore Rare Metals Inc. marks a major milestone in establishing a complete North American rare earths supply chain with links in Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, and Alaska. Vital has already established Canada's only rare earths mine at its Nechalacho project in Northwest Territories and is building a processing facility in Saskatchewan to upgrade the high-grade ore into a midstream carbonated product with a mix of rare...
With such incredible technologies at mankind's disposal today, it is easily forgotten the ingenuity and sheer gumption that our predecessors brought to solving some of the more rigorous and demanding jobs that construed early development. The ever-present wheel, hand tools, weaponry, and beyond, the plethora of devices humanity has created, only expanded into breathtaking and mind-numbing concepts our forebearers could never fathom. Areas such as animal husbandry, agriculture,...
Mineral exploration activity is heating up this summer in Nunavut after a yearlong hiatus sparked by restrictions and cautionary moves driven by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. For the northern Canadian territory's two mine operators and a handful of advanced- and early-stage explorers, the outlook for 2021 programs is much brighter. In mid-June, the Government of Nunavut gave Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. the green light to allow its workers living in the Kivalliq region of...
From the advancements of technology during the Bronze Age to the computers and telecommunication systems of today's Big Data Era, tin has been critical to human progress for at least 5,500 years. Sometime around 3500 BC, Sumerians living in modern day Turkey and Iran discovered that mixing a little tin with copper created bronze, an alloy that produced much more durable weapons and tools than those cast from copper alone. This cutting-edge discovery offered a strategic and...
White Rock Minerals Ltd. this week reported that exploration crews have discovered a new gold prospect near the Last Chance target on its Red Mountain project and drills have tapped an extension of the Hunter volcanogenic massive sulfide zinc discovery at the eastern end of this 323-square-mile (836 square kilometers) multimineral project in Alaska. "White Rock has a plethora of exploration opportunities across its contiguous Last Chance-Red Mountain project in central...
"Please mine more nickel," these four words from Tesla CEO Elon Musk reverberated across the global mining sector and raised awareness of how fundamental nickel is to the lithium-ion batteries powering hundreds of millions of electric vehicles to come off Tesla and traditional automaker assembly lines over the next two decades. "Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way," Musk implored...
From jewelry at a black-tie soiree to scrubbing harmful emissions from the exhaust system of a farm truck, the six platinum group metals – platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium – are metals that are both precious and critical to the United States and Canada. Extremely rare, durable, and with a brilliance that does not tarnish, platinum and other metals in its group are a treasured choice for high-end jewelry that stands the test of time. Three of the...
From electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy to smartphones connected to 5G networks, new technologies take advantage of the special properties of a suite of critical minerals and metals that are often rare and in short supply. In addition to the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and other technology metals that capture headline attention, this list includes even more obscure mined materials such as gallium, germanium, scandium, and tellurium. While scarce, these critical...
With a vision to become a leading base metals mining company, Osisko Metals Inc. is rapidly advancing exploration and engineering studies at its Pine Point project about 42 kilometers (26 miles) east of Hay River, Northwest Territories. A preliminary economic assessment completed in mid-2020 outlines a mine at Pine Point that would produce an average of 327 million pounds of zinc and 143 million lb of lead annually over an initial 10-year mine life. At an average zinc price...
