The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Geologist Howard Marcus inspects core during the 2016 program at the Iskut project in northern British Columbia.
Seabridge Gold Inc. July 10 said it is has nearly completed a surface sampling and geophysics to establish locations for an 8,500-meter drill program about to get underway at its Iskut gold project in northwestern British Columbia and drilling. The focus of this work is on the Quartz Rise target identified last year.
Over the past several months, Seabridge has compiled considerable historical data and integrated it into the results from the company's 2016 program.
Interpretations of this robust data set support the presence of a large, preserved Jurassic porphyry system at depth, with an overlaying epithermal mineral system obscured by extensive leaching of a lithocap, or upper alteration zone, at Quartz Rise.
Two phases of drilling are planned to evaluate the potential for high-grade gold concentrations within the untested Quartz Rise lithocap.
The primary target area hosts a package of clay-and-silica-altered tuffaceous rocks that are intensely leached at surface.
Conceptually, the target appears to be a stacked lithocap-hosted precious metals system similar to the El Indio (Chile), Mulatos (Mexico) and Baguio (Philippines) gold deposits.
"We are pursuing a classical model of metal deposition at Iskut which seems to explain the known data," said Seabridge Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk. "In our view, Iskut hosts district-scale porphyry-style mineral systems similar to our nearby KSM project. These systems account for Iskut's numerous gold and copper mineral occurrences. Our data suggests these systems could be largely intact from top to bottom, unlike KSM. We are concentrating our work on the upper parts of these systems, targeting the high-grade gold potential which historically has been the hallmark of the Iskut district."
-SHANE LASLEY
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