White Cliff Minerals flags promising Great Bear anomalies

White Cliff Minerals has found multiple anomalies in line with high-grade copper, gold, silver and uranium surface samples at Great Bear in Canada.

The company believes Great Bear's copper and gold potential has been overlooked in the past in favour of uranium. Pic: Getty Images.

• WCN spots multiple anomalies to back high-grade surface samples at Great Bear

• Project sits in prospective uranium, copper and gold region in Canada

• Drilling also underway at nearby Rae copper project

 

Special Report: White Cliff Minerals has found multiple, large-scale anomalies coincident with high-grade copper, gold, silver and uranium surface samples at its Great Bear project in Canada.

The project is close to significant historical mining operations such as the Eldorado, Echo Bay and Contact Lake mines that produced uranium, copper, gold and silver and world-class silver mines like Bonanza and El Bonanza.

It’s a proven area, producing (pre-1982) around 13.7Mlb of uranium oxide, 34.3Moz of refined silver, 11,377,040lb of copper, 127,000kg of nickel, 227,000kg of cobalt and 104,000kg lead.

It’s also one of Canada’s largest uranium districts and because of that, White Cliff Minerals (ASX:WCN) reckons the significant copper and gold potential of Great Bear has been overlooked.

Data from a MobileMT survey last year has identified multiple untested anomalies and targets for IOCG (gold, copper, silver and uranium) and epithermal (high-grade gold and silver) types of mineralisation.

At the Phoenix deposit, a large coherent anomaly coincides with surface samples of:

• 38.2g/t gold and 76.5g/t silver
• 29.7g/t gold and 121g/t silver
• 42.6% copper, 2.28g/t gold and 159g/t silver

At Coyote, a discrete high intensity anomaly overlays previous results of 17.4g/t gold, 16.95g/t gold and 10.55% copper within a 5km2 collapsed caldera in an area that a Canadian state survey previously identified as having the highest potential for IOCG in Canada.

And at Viper – another area identified as being IOCG prospective – a large conductive anomaly has been identified extending from surface to a depth of more than 1400m demonstrating clear potential for large-scale IOCG style mineralisation.

WCN also flagged a new, high-priority target 7.9km southeast of Viper, along the Contact Lake fault, which covers an area almost geologically identical to the historical Eldorado and Echo Bay mines, both of which produced large quantities of uranium and silver.

Just scratching the surface at Great Bear

While maiden drilling is underway at the company’s nearby Rae copper project, Southern Geosciences interpreted the aerial geophysical data from Great Bear, providing a pipeline of targets for the company to investigate in drilling this year.

Managing director Troy Whittaker said the independent validation of sub-surface geophysics really bolstered last year’s maiden field campaign which saw substantial and high-grade mineralisation at surface.

“At Great Bear, a pipeline of targets now exists with robust gold, copper, silver and uranium geophysical signatures for follow up, with drill targets to be defined alongside further ground truthing of the project which covers over 110km north-south of the proven mineral producing Great Bear Magmatic Zone,” Whittaker said.

“This project is starting to develop into a greater regional play, where we have a substantial tenure holding.

“It is important to bear in mind that we have only scratched the surface in the central area to date.

“With our recently announced exploration agreement with the Délı̨nę Got’ı̨nę Government we are looking forward to how this project can complement the ever increasing potential at our Rae copper project.”

Drilling is ongoing at Rae, where earlier this month the company announced that extensive sulphides were observed in step-out drilling , pointing to copper mineralisation at the project.

This article was developed in collaboration with White Cliff Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.