The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Tectonic is testing three targets along the Flume gold trend North of 60 Mining News – July 8, 2022
Prospecting being carried out at Flume during Tectonic Metals' 2018 exploration of the Seventymile gold property in Alaska.
Tectonic Metals Inc. July 7 announced that drilling is now underway at Seventymile, a district-scale gold project in eastern Alaska.
Optioned from Doyon Ltd., an Alaska Native regional corporation, Seventymile encompasses an underexplored 25-mile- (40 kilometers) long greenstone belt about 37 miles (59 kilometers) east of the town of Eagle, Alaska.
While gold has been identified along the entire greenstone belt covered by Seventymile, the 2022 drilling will focus on three targets along the roughly five-mile- (eight kilometers) long Flume trend toward the northwestern end of the property.
At these three prospects – Flanders, Flume, and Alder – shallowly-dipping, low-angle tension vein swarms occur adjacent to interpreted, largely undrilled, controlling shear structures. Limited historical diamond drilling in 1990 and 2000 at these targets demonstrated the presence of high gold grades and significant strike potential.
Highlights from the historical drilling at these targets include:
• 1.52 meters averaging 104.75 grams per metric ton gold (Flanders).
• 15.24 meters averaging 5.3 g/t gold (Flanders).
• 2.07 meters averaging 29.3 g/t gold (Flume).
• 10.37 meters averaging 2.08 g/t gold (Flume).
• 6.7 meters averaging 1.29 g/t gold (Alder).
Tectonic carried out its own exploration at Seventymile from 2018 to 2020, which helped to validate the continuity of the mineralized structures across the Flume trend. This included rotary air blast drilling in 2020. Highlights from this RAB drill program include:
• 19.81 meters averaging 1.37 g/t gold (Bonanza).
• 6.1 meters averaging 4.38 g/t gold (Flanders).
• 4.57 meters averaging 1.2 g/t gold (Flanders).
This year's drilling will focus on obtaining detailed geological information while testing for grade, scale, and potential expansion at Flanders, Flume, and Alder.
At Flanders, the 2022 drilling will target high-grade north-dipping quartz tension veins hosted by a distinctive iron-rich basalt unit that are open for expansion to the northwest, east, southeast, and at depth. Shear-hosted mineralization at the northern structural contact of the high iron basalt unit, which is interpreted to be the controlling feature of the tension veins drilled to date, will also be tested this year.
At Flume, drilling will focus on expanding the known shear-tension vein gold mineralization system by testing the down-dip extent of the shear while also stepping east across Flume Creek to test an interpreted continuation of the system in an undrilled area where soil sampling returned grades as high as 590 parts per billion gold.
At Alder, drills will test high tenor gold-in-soil anomalies with sample grades as high as 2.34 g/t gold that are found in the same iron-rich basalt as observed at Flanders. Drilling will focus on stepping west of the historic drilling into the basalt.
"It is extremely rare to come across a cohesive, 40-km long underexplored greenstone belt, such as Seventymile, in a Tier 1 jurisdiction. We begin our 2022 season with a renewed intensity, fueled by the extensive interpretive work undertaken by our team, towards delineating what we believe to be top-tier, discovery-ready drill targets," said Tectonic Metals President and CEO Tony Reda. "The Tectonic team is laser-focused on executing an efficient drill program designed to confirm these target settings and create shareholder value."
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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