Manhattan Gold Corporation has sharpened the exploration picture in Nunavut, Canada, completing a high-resolution LiDAR and orthophoto survey across its entire Hook Lake gold project. The company has also wrapped up a maiden channel sampling program at its newly acquired Vanquish prospect.
The new datasets are landing just as the first drill program in more than three decades at the project continues to test the historic Jaws gold deposit.
Manhattan says it secured the sophisticated aerial survey at a significantly reduced cost by piggybacking on a specialist aircraft already mobilised in the remote region.
The survey is set to deliver a detailed digital terrain model and high-resolution orthophotos to support structural interpretation, drill targeting and future exploration planning.
In parallel with the aerial survey, the company’s field crew completed its first-ever channel and rock chip sampling program at the Vanquish prospect. A total of 47 samples were collected to reconfirm historical surface results, including up to 5.75 grams per tonne (g/t) gold over 1.5 metres.
The samples, which have now been dispatched to the laboratory for analysis, targeted quartz-veined, sulphide-bearing volcanic and gabbro rocks.
Manhattan Gold Corporation technical advisor Eric Sondergaard said: “The exploration program is fully active, with the drill rig turning on site and drilling advancing as planned. This is the key operational step in the current program, moving the company from target definition into direct drill testing. In parallel, our field team has completed the first-ever channel sampling at the Vanquish prospect, with those samples now at the laboratory.”
The fieldwork has been run in parallel with the company’s main event – a 4000-metre reverse circulation drill program that kicked off in late June.
The drill bit is currently probing the Jaws prospect, which hosts a non-JORC historical foreign estimate of 3.4 million tonnes grading 2.38g/t gold for 285,000 ounces. The campaign has been designed to follow up on impressive historical drill intercepts from 1988, which featured a hefty 52.78m hit at 3.38g/t gold.
The Hook Lake project sits within the underexplored yet highly prospective Rankin-Ennadai greenstone belt, the second largest of its kind in Canada. The belt also hosts major operations such as Agnico Eagle's Meliadine mine 225 kilometres to the northeast, which produces 400,000 ounces of gold per annum.
Apart from Jaws, Manhattan has a conga line of other high-grade targets slated for first-ever drill testing, including the Quantum and Lotus prospects where rock chip sampling last year returned 16.75g/t gold and a spectacular 2660g/t silver hit, respectively.
With a new board, fresh cash in the bank from a recent $3 million placement and the drill rods now spinning, Manhattan looks to be building a fresh understanding of a project that has sat largely idle for a generation. The addition of project-wide LiDAR data adds another important layer to that work.
As the drill rig continues to probe the historical Jaws resource and with assays from the new Vanquish prospect now in the pipeline, the company is generating multiple streams of news flow.
If the new data can help unlock the secrets of this underexplored greenstone belt, Manhattan’s new Canadian chapter could become very interesting, very quickly.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Murray Ward
