White Cliff Minerals says it is now the single-biggest holder of mineral exploration claims in Canada’s Northwest Territories after it was granted new licence approvals for the province’s Radium Point project.
The company is focussed on iron oxide-copper-gold-uranium deposits and silver mineralisation in the area that hosts the historical Eldorado, Echo Bay and Contact Lake mines. Previous production from the project area prior to 1982 shows impressive figures including 13.7 million pounds of uranium oxide, 34.2 million ounces of refined silver and more than 11.3 million pounds of copper with associated gold credits.
Additional resources produced within the tenements include 104,000kg of lead, 127,000kg of nickel and 227,000kg of cobalt.
Management says initial exploration work will focus on former mined areas for extensions to exploited mineral bodies, in addition to known outcropping prospects through air and ground geophysics, rock chip sampling on previously-identified outcropping high-grade uranium mineralisation and confirmation testing of larger geochemically-anomalous areas throughout the broader project area in preparation for drilling.
According to the company, mineral exploration has been largely non-existent in the area since the late 1980s. Uranium mining ceased in 1960 and silver and copper mining came to a halt in the 1980s.
Previous regional airborne surveys will be used to guide initial work at Radium Point, in addition to the information contained within the mass of historical data containing large amounts of drill, soil, rock chip and trench results.
White Cliff Minerals chairman Rod McIllree said: "With the granting of these licences, we are now finalising contractor selection and anticipate commencing exploration activities in Q2 2024. The Radium point programme will run in close collaboration with planned work at Coppermine, the company’s recently granted district scale copper project.”
McIllree also said that in some instances the company plans to use the same contractors, with geophysical programs to culminate in extensive drilling on outcropping areas identified within the large-scale mineralised area.
Eldorado is considered to be the first mine in the Northwest Territories to have radium and silver as the original metals of interest. Uranium became the target resource in 1942, followed by silver and copper from 1975.
The historic Echo Bay mine is adjacent to Eldorado and produced more than 23.5 million ounces of silver and 4505 tonnes of copper between 1964 and 1974.
Contact Lake was initially mined for silver, with minor uranium amounts also recovered. More recent work focused on remnant material and tailings thought to contain a large amount of residual silver.
Just last month, the Nunuvut Planning Commission gave White Cliff the green light to kick off exploration at its nearby Coppermine project in Canada, where it will follow up on high-grade historical copper results.
Historical exploration previously identified dozens of outcropping occurrences of copper and silver mineralisation across the 805-square-kilometre project. It includes one rock chip sample from the Halo prospect returning assays of 30.24 per cent copper and 34 grams per tonne silver, while a second showed 30.25 per cent copper and 43g/t silver.
With a swathe of ground under its belt in areas of known mineralisation from historical mining, White Cliff looks poised to become a major player in the Canadian exploration scene.
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By Michael Philipps
