Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Mawson Resources (TSX: MAW) CEO Michael Hudson on Utilizing the Recently Completed Ground Magnetic Survey to Define Drill Targets at the Rajapalot Gold Project

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is Chairman and CEO of Mawson Resources (TSX: MAW)(OTC: MWSNF), Mr. Michael Hudson. Mike, how are you this afternoon?

Michael Hudson: I'm very well. Thanks, Gerardo. Thanks, as always, for having me back.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you for your time. You have a lot going for you with Mawson. You have the Goldcorp investment, the recent investment by Goldcorp. A very robust treasury. You have three diamond drill rigs operating around the clock with more than 60 people at camp. And you've now completed a 90 line kilometer infill ground magnetic survey at Rajapalot in Finland, at the project there.

Can you provide the details? I'll be very honest with you, I was looking through the release and some of my favorite words were in there, but they were back to back to back to back, and if I tried to recite them I would have sounded silly. So I'll let you guide me through the release and the key points.

Michael Hudson: Thanks, Gerardo. I think you hit them pretty well in the intro. Lots of activity. And this is really a PR to show that activity. Ground magnetics was the focus of the PR. We've just done 90 line kilometers over the last three to four weeks. And why's that important?

We've done a lot of geophysics on the project, starting with airborne geophysics. Mainly electromagnetics and magnetics. And that's quite broad spaced. That can be 50 meter to a 100 meter spacing. And now we brought this ground magnetic data back down to 25 meter spacing or less, which really allows us to trace the mineralized horizon under cover. As we've talked about, there's 99% glacial till or glacial soil profile over the mineralized rocks, over the whole sequence. And to trace that mineralized horizon, it has some specific magnetic characteristics that makes it very amenable for searching with ground magnetics. The more detail that we can get out of the magnetics, the more detailed drill targets we can define. That's number one.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. And I noticed that it was done at 25 meters as opposed to 50 meter line spacing. Can you talk to me a bit about that and the approach there?

Michael Hudson: This is a very complex sequence that we're dealing with here. We're dealing with rocks that are 1.9 to 2.2 billions years old. So they've seen a good deal of the earth's history, which comes with lots of folding and faulting and being cooked up to very high temperatures and pressures. It's like essentially a bowl of spaghetti in many respects and we've got to just find those one or two strands of the spaghetti that are magnetic for the most part, that contain the gold. And when we can do that, then we can start to target the gold with more accuracy. More defined magnetics gives us more refined targets.

Gerardo Del Real: Talk to me a bit about the iron-rich nature of the mineralized rocks. I noticed that's something that you mentioned in the release was a common theme in both the oxide or the sulfide forms. Can you speak to that a bit, Mike?

Michael Hudson: This is getting quite technical now, so hold on. We have two different magnetic minerals, magnetite, which is an iron oxide, and pyrite and pyrrhotite. Now, pyrrhotite is an iron sulfide, as is pyrite, but it's magnetic. And we can differentiate, with the magnetic measurements, the pyrrhotite from magnetite. And pyrrhotite is mainly associated with the gold. Wherever we see pyrrhotite, generally, most of the time we have gold. Unlike pyrite where we can get large or broad halos of pyrite without the gold.

So if we can map the pyrrhotite, this magnetic mineral, magnetic iron sulfide, then we've got a very good chance of defining the gold. And then it becomes really complex. The pyrrhotite has retained a different magnetic field to the magnetite, so we can filter the difference between those magnetic minerals. It's very high tech stuff. Something that I've never seen done before on our project, but it seems to be working quite well.

Gerardo Del Real: That stood out, and when I mentioned some of my favorite words, those were a couple. And another line that stood out to me was the fact that the alteration is clearly post-metamorphic, reduced and most likely driven by granitoid intrusions. Can you speak to that a bit?

Michael Hudson: This is where we start to become observational. Certainly the mineralization looks like it's post all that bowl of spaghetti being folded and faulted. So the mineralization looks quite late. We've got multiple mineralization events. And it looks like there's a big heat source just through the chemistry of the mineralization and the nature of how we see the gold mineralization manifest itself with a big heat source at depth.

These granites at depth that are cooking the mineralization and repeating pulses of mineralization into the rocks when this was forming. We think about 1.78 billion years ago, and then some younger events. This has all the hallmarks, I suppose. You know very much about this business now to be asking those questions. We see the potential for a very large system with all the right ingredients.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Now to find that large system you have three rigs turning right now. There's two rigs planned to join in mid-March. What's the camp look like right now, Mike? It's got to be exciting times there.

Michael Hudson: I only returned from site a week or so ago, and it's busy. It's busy. There's core going everywhere, and geologists and field technicians and drillers. We have over 60 people at site with staff and contractors. This is our main drilling period in the winter, when we can get most of the meters in where it's quite wet. We love it that it freezes. It's just a very exciting time. Because we've got so many results starting to flow, internally we're very excited on a day-by-day basis. And then we'll start to release those results coming up. There was a little tidbit in this press release that our first set of results will be announced in the first week of March. So the public can start to share in our excitement as the results start to flow.

Gerardo Del Real: Wonderful. Can people look you up or find you at PDAC?

Michael Hudson: Absolutely, we're there every year. We'll be in booth 2941. And I'll be giving a presentation, also, on Monday the 5th at 3:15 p.m. in room 802. So please come along, join us in the booth. We'll have some of the rocks we're drilling right now to show you. We've got Dr. Nick Cook, the President of Mawson, and Janne Kinnunen, our Senior Geologist, also joining me amongst some of the other staff and directors from Canada. We'll have a full booth and welcome everyone to come along and have a look at our rocks.

Gerardo Del Real: And I encourage everybody to take Mike up on that. If you've ever had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Cook, I can attest for the fact that it's always educational and insightful. I encourage everyone to take the opportunity.

Mike, thank you so much. I look forward to it. I'm calling assays now progress reports here soon, hopefully in the next week or two.

Michael Hudson: Look forward to talking about them when we next speak ideally, Gerardo. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you, Mike.

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