Categories:
Base Metals
/
General Market Commentary
/
Precious Metals
Topics:
General Base Metals
/
General Market Commentary
/
General Precious Metals
Accumulating copper, gold at Alaska Range
PolarX Ltd. is ready to kick off the initial phase of its 2018 drill program at its Alaska Range copper-gold project.
Encompassing the Stellar and Caribou Dome properties, the Alaska Range blankets a 22-mile mineralized trend that hosts Zackly, a high-grade skarn deposit with roughly 91 million pounds of copper and 213,000 ounces of gold; Caribou Dome, a sediment-hosted deposit with 280 million pounds of copper; and numerous exploration targets.
The initial 23-hole program slated for this year will focus on expanding the known high‐grade Zackly copper‐gold skarn deposit and continue to gather evidence of a potentially much larger porphyry copper-gold deposit nearby.
This year's program supports PolarX' strategy to rapidly accumulate a sufficient copper‐gold inventory between Zackly and Caribou Dome to support feasibility studies on a combined operation on one or more stand‐alone operations.
Expanding Zackly
Australia-based PolarX acquired the Stellar property early last year in a three-company deal that also involved Vista Minerals Pty Ltd., a privately held exploration company from Australia, and Millrock Resources Inc., a project generator with a portfolio of Alaska gold and copper exploration projects.
Merging Stellar with adjacent Caribou Dome property, already held by PolarX, the Down Under explorer focused its 2017 program on upgrading a historical resource for Zackly to Australian Joint Ore Reserves Committee (JORC) mineral reporting standards.
This 13-hole drill program executed by Millrock, which now owns a 9.76 percent stake in PolarX, outlined 3.4 million metric tons of JORC-compliant inferred resource grading 1.2 percent (90.4 million pounds) copper, 2 grams per metric ton (213,000 oz) gold and 14 g/t (1.5 million oz) silver.
This shallow deposit has been traced for a length of about 1,000 meters and PolarX said it is clearly open along strike and at depth.
"The fact that we have readily upgraded the resource to JORC standard while maintaining the same quantity of contained metal further underpins our confidence in the potential to significantly expand the project," PolarX Managing Director Frazer Tabeart said.
Induced polarization geophysical surveys completed at Zackly are being used to vector the 23 holes slated for Zackly, which will primarily target expansion of the deposit to depth and to the east.
Tabeart said this obvious expansion of Zackly provides the most immediate value for investors as the company continues to refine drill targets that could result in new discoveries across the Alaska Range project.
Stellar porphyry potential
When it comes to discoveries, PolarX is excited about the evidence of deeper porphyry mineralization along a 6,000-meter corridor that encompasses Zackly.