The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2022 - January 19, 2023
Copper alteration in limestone at Core Assets' Blue property in Northern British Columbia.
Leveraging substantial advancements in the understanding of porphyry, skarn, and carbonate replacement type deposits over the past 40 years, Core Assets Corp. is making news discoveries on the long overlooked Blue property in British Columbia's Golden Triangle.
Located along BC's border with Alaska in the Atlin Mining District, Blue is a 275,890-acre (111,650 hectares) land package covering high-grade skarn and carbonate replacement and porphyry prospects enriched with copper, gold, zinc, silver, and lead.
This district-scale property is also transected by the Llewellyn Fault Zone, a major structural feature that seems to play an important role in the mineralization of near-surface metal occurrences across Blue.
Since assembling the district-scale land package and listing on the Canadian Securities Exchange in 2020, Core has been carrying out early exploration in preparation for a 2022 drill program that targeted two primary project areas – Laverdiere and Silver Lime.
Core's inaugural drill program at Blue began near the French Adit area of Laverdiere, a prospect area in the southern part of the property that hosts three areas of outcropping skarn mineralization.
Historical drilling at Laverdiere cut 46 meters averaging 1.76% copper from surface; and 175 meters averaging 0.27% copper from surface.
In early June, Core launched a 1,806-meter drill program at Laverdiere targeting a high-grade iron-copper-gold skarn and copper-molybdenum mineralization mapped over 800 meters on surface.
The first hole, LAV22-001, cut 95.05 meters averaging 0.47% copper, 3.24 grams per metric ton silver, and 0.06 g/t gold from a depth of one meter, confirming the presence of high-grade copper and associated gold skarn.
From a depth of 163.5 meters, LAV22-001 also cut 1.51 meters averaging 4.59 g/t gold and 0.38 g/t silver, confirming the presence of high-grade gold hosted within the Llewellyn Fault Zone.
LAV22-002, the deepest hole drilled at Blue to date, cut 210.5 meters averaging 0.11% copper, 0.05 g/t gold, and 1.76 g/t silver from a depth of 15 meters, including two meters averaging 3.01% copper, 0.3 g/t gold, and 18.8 g/t silver from 104 meters.
"The goal of drilling in the French Adit area was to determine the depth extent of historic copper and gold skarn mineralization from surface and to test the porphyry Cu-Mo (copper-molybdenum) potential of the Laverdiere intrusion," said Core Assets President and CEO Nick Rodway. "These results have confirmed and over exceeded our expectations – especially when considering the shear-hosted gold hit within the LFZ."
Core says four additional holes drilled at Laverdiere cut similar high-temperature skarn and porphyry-style mineralization, veining, and alteration over a strike of 850 meters.
Following the completion of drilling at Laverdiere, the rig at Blue was moved to Silver Lime, a carbonate replacement copper-zinc-silver prospect about 10 kilometers (six miles) to the east.
An extensive first-pass exploration program carried out at Silver Lime in 2021 defined a 3,700- by 1,800-meter area of high-grade carbonate replacement and skarn mineralization within a broad 6.6-kilometer (4.1 miles) mineralized corridor of conductive anomalies that appear to be interconnected at depth by vertical conductive features.
The 2022 program at Silver Lime included 5,355 meters of drilling in 15 holes testing the Jackie, Grizzly, and Sulphide City silver-zinc-lead-copper carbonate replacement targets.
Highlights from this drilling include 1.25 meters averaging 215 g/t silver, 9.9% zinc, 8.9 % lead, and 0.36% copper in hole SLM22-001 (Jackie); and 1.16 meters averaging 1,145 g/t silver, 23.5% zinc, 23.2% lead, 0.52% copper, 0.37g/t gold (Grizzly).
"The greater than 47% combined base and precious metal content of the Grizzly CRD intercept is the highest-grade result recovered from the Silver Lime Project to-date and puts the Silver Lime Project on the map for high-grade CRD projects globally," said Rodway. "This CRD mineralization fits well into the Porphyry-CRD continuum model that we are revealing through drilling and gives us a much better understanding of the system's plumbing network."
Additional drilling is planned for Silver Lime in 2023.
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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