Seabridge Gold reported that early results from the 2014 drill program at its 100% owned KSM project in northwestern British Columbia have confirmed a major new gold-copper occurrence beneath the Iron Cap deposit, one of the project’s four large porphyry deposits. The discovery, which began to emerge in the 2013 drill program, is called the Iron Cap Lower Zone. The drill program is now being intensified to generate sufficient data for an initial resource estimate expected by January 2015.
Seabridge Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk said, “A key objective for this year’s drilling is to find additional higher-grade core zones following last year’s major discovery of the Deep Kerr deposit. The potential below Iron Cap was our No. 1 new target because of where it is. Iron Cap Lower Zone sits about 1,000 m laterally from the access tunnels designed for the KSM project, which should make it efficient to develop and mine.
“Also, the existing Iron Cap deposit is already designed as an underground block cave mine. Extending this deposit down plunge into higher-grade gold and copper in the Lower Zone could significantly improve the Iron Cap deposit with little change to the KSM project design.”
Iron Cap currently hosts a probable reserve of 193 million metric tons (mt) grading 0.45 g/mt gold, 0.20% copper, and 5.32 g/mt silver. This year’s drilling indicates that the Lower Zone has excellent size and continuity as well as higher grades than the Iron Cap deposit above it.
Seabridge also reported that this year’s drilling on the Deep Kerr deposit has extended the deposit along strike and at depth while validating the resource block model.
