TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Canadian project developer Seabridge Resources on Wednesday revealed that early results from this year's drill programme at its flagship KSM project, in north-western British Columbia, had confirmed a major new gold/copper occurrence beneath Iron Cap, one of the project's four large porphyry deposits.

The discovery, which started to emerge in the 2013 drill programme, was called the Iron Cap Lower Zone, resulting in the company intensifying its drill programme to generate enough data for an initial resource estimate expected by January next year.

“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 is our number-one 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," Seabridge chairperson and CEO Rudi Fronk said.

Last year's Deep Kerr core zone discovery resulted in an initial inferred resource of 515-million tonnes, averaging 0.53% copper and 0.36 g/t gold, a substantial grade improvement compared with the Kerr deposit lying above it.

Iron Cap currently hosted a probable reserve of 193-million tonnes, grading 0.45 g/t gold, 0.20% copper and 5.32 g/t silver. Drilling below the Iron Cap deposit in 2013 obtained promising results, particularly drill hole IC-13-49, which returned 207 m of 1.22 g/t gold.

However, 2013 drilling did not test the width and strike of the projected core zone owing to a lack of suitable drill-pad locations. Holes in the 2014 programme had been designed to cut across the projected core zone at Iron Cap to determine the width and strike of the zone using advanced steering equipment that was capable of altering the orientation of the drilling as it progressed.

These new holes indicated that the Lower Zone had excellent size and continuity as well as higher grades than the Iron Cap deposit above it. Drill hole IC-14-53 and 54 demonstrated the intensive and extensive potassic alteration, characterised by secondary orthoclase and abundant quartz-feldspar-sulphide veins, which confirmed the presence of a core zone and could lead to even better grades at depth, the company noted.