Before the end of the year, Aura Resources (TSXV: AUU) decided to share its plans for the Gold Chain project, which the Ontario miner acquired last July.
In a press release, the company said that as soon as 2019 kicks off, they want to start mapping and sampling the area using geophysics, geochemistry, alteration studies and advanced deposit modeling. The idea is to obtain information that will be later integrated with historical drill data.
While this campaign is ongoing, management will also start the permitting process for drilling in the hope that it is possible to turn on the drills in the Spring.
The Gold Chain project is located in the San Francisco district, Mohave County, western Arizona. It is about 7 kilometres northeast of Bullhead City and about 120 kilometres southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Aura explained that the property consisted of 86 unpatented claims containing numerous exposures comprised of epithermal-style gold mineralization, which are within an area of about 10 square kilometres.
Historical records show that limited mining occurred prior to 1940. Later on, companies such as Fisher-Watt, Anaconda, Western States, Ivy Minerals and American Copper and Nickel Corp explored the area during the 1980s. According to the archives, most of the previous exploration employed a ‘detachment’ structural model owing to a close spatial relation between gold mineralization and a fault breccia developed at the Tertiary/Pre-Cambrian contact at one of the historical mines.
“The geologic work conducted in the 1980s identified features consistent with a ‘detachment-type’ gold deposit similar to other deposits which were successfully explored in the eastern Basin and Range province during that time. Although the historic model may remain applicable, drill hole data suggests a steeper structural component and possibly representing the upper levels of epithermal veins spatially related to numerous rhyolite dikes and plugs in both the footwall and hanging wall of the detachment structure. I suspect that drilling in the 1990s did not sufficiently consider a steeper mineral conduit and many of the holes were terminated prematurely or entirely missed the gold zone. The existing resource, although not NI 43-101 compliant, may be readily expanded by testing the margins at slightly greater depths and different angles,” Aura’s President & CEO, Robert Johansing, said in the media statement.
Johansing reiterated that a large amount of technical data has been compiled and is currently being evaluated prior to the upcoming field program.
Source: Mining.com
