Deep gold sought
Aura Silver completes summer drill program near Baker Lake
Walter Strong
Northern News Services
Published Monday, December 8, 2014
QAMANITTUAQ/BAKER LAKE
A junior mining company received a surprise while searching for silver deposits in the Kivalliq area, they struck gold.
A drilling crew on Aurora Silver Resources' 550 square-kilometre Greyhound property near Baker Lake in 2010. Meadowbank gold mine owner Agnico Eagle Mining Ltd. completed a summer drilling program on the property recently under an option agreement. - Photo courtesy Aurora Silver Resources
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About 40 km northeast of Baker Lake, Aura Silver Resources Inc. (TSX.V:AUU) has been developing its 100 per cent owned Greyhound property since 2006.
It was a tight year for the junior exploration company, but thanks to an option agreement with Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd., the owner and operator of the Meadowbank gold mine, the property saw almost 1,000 metres of exploratory drilling completed this summer.
The 550 square-kilometre property is comprised of 57 separate staked claims. As the company's namesake would suggest, prospectors staked out the property near Aura Lake, originally looking for silver. But Aura Silver prospectors turned up strong gold showings where none were expected.
"We had several silver properties on a Caribbean island, in El Salvador, and Mexico," said Paul Pitman a consulting geologist for Aura Resources. "My partner said lets put Greyhound in. We staked the property and went up a year later with a prospecting team. That's when one prospector found a sample that was almost an ounce gold."
Instead of silver mineralization, Aura Silver found a silver-lining in rich gold sulfides.
"In our profession, anything with sulfides in it, you sample it," Pitman said.
"It came back 28 grams gold and no silver, everyone was surprised."
Twenty eight grams gold per tonne (g/t) is almost an ounce g/t (0.9877 ounce), rich enough for anyone to try and narrow down the underground source. And that wasn't even the largest showing which came back 30 g/t.
To be sure, prospecting did turn up silver resources (up to 5,000 grams per tonne) -- and continues to do so -- but gold became a second principle driver for the project.
In 2011 Aura Silver did some drilling to find the source of the surface gold, but came up relatively dry after drilling four holes.
Pitman reasoned the deposits were deep, too deep for traditional analysis so they contracted Ontario's Activation Laboratories Ltd. to conduct a Spatiotemporal geochemical hydrocarbon analysis, or SGH, on the property. The relatively new analysis method analyzes organic compounds found in surface or near surface soils for what technologists can recognize as traces of deep deposits.
Thanks to this analysis, Aura Silver produced drill-ready targets. All that remained was to raise the capital to fund more exploration.
Finding capital is famously difficult in today's market, but Aura Silver attracted the attention of Agnico-Eagle who already had drilling equipment and crews in the region thanks to the companies own extensive mining and exploration programs in the area. Agnico Eagle took an option to earn up to 51 per cent interest in the Greyhound property upon completing a $1.75 million work commitment to drill the property. That agreement was announced at the start of this summer, and Agnico Eagle had drills in the ground shortly after the announcement.
After 894 metres of drilling to depths of 186 metres, 452 core samples were collected and assayed. An additional 328 rock samples were prospected.
In a Dec. 1 press release, Aura Silver stated that drilling to date has confirmed high-grade gold, silver and copper sulphides. Twenty per cent of samples collected returned gold, silver and copper showings, with the highest being gold at 15.5 g/t, silver at 3,850 g/t and copper up to 3.3 per cent.
Some of the drilling was designed to increase understanding of sub-surface geology, and so did not return precious metal values, although they weren't necessarily expected to return them. The company hasn't yet filed assay results from all drilling on SEDAR.
Aura Silver reports Agnico Eagle will continue with drilling in 2015 under a $500,000 commitment.
