Read on for a detailed discussion of new results from the 3rd sampling program at Rodruin with Mr. Javier Orduña, Exploration Manager, and Mr. Tim Neall, Project Geologist for Aton Resources (TSXV:AAN). This interview follows a trio done with Javier and Tim since the discovery of Rodruin in December, 2017. Find the first 3 interviews here. Thanks very much to Javier and Tim for the detailed discussion in our interviews and relevant news releases!
Find the important news for company in full here.
Javier: We’ve been working up here for the last three months since we came back after Christmas. We’ve completed what we think was useful surface sampling and we’re pretty happy with the results. As you can see, the road is progressing nicely, so hopefully we won’t have to be walking in for much longer. It’s all going fairly well at the moment.
Tim: We’ve just finished the mapping, as well. We should have a geological map in the next week or so.
Peter: Great. Any difficulties with the road? It looks like the path went along pretty much where you expected and you’re over halfway.
Tim: No difficulties. It’s all gone pretty well. The difficult bit was at the beginning where you have to climb out to the main wadi. Once you’re out of the main wadi, you’re on to a relatively flat plateau with a gentle rounded top and it’s fairly easy to push a road. It’s harder in some areas but can be done.
Javier: We actually had a problem with the first contractor we used. Unfortunately, we had to stand him down after 10 days on site. We’ve had a gap of about two weeks while we got another contractor in. The second contractor’s doing a very good job. We’re happy with the progress.
Peter: All the challenges of working in Egypt! And you mentioned the geological mapping, Tim. We’ve heard that this is a complex area and I saw some comments on that in the release that jumped out at me. One was about the high-grade gold appearing in the shears and the folds, which sounds like a pretty gold-rich environment.
Tim: It is an interesting place. There appears to be two completely separate styles of mineralization in the area. There is what we call the Hamama style and then superimposed on top of that are these very high-grade, very complex zones that are almost vertical. The mineralization in these pipes is irregular and consists of numerous veins rather than one single vein – lots of veins in a very small area like a stockwork. They seem to be associated with these very steep, almost vertical fold noses and similar shear dislocations where the main carbonate bodies have been shifted sideways. There are no real faults or simple fractures; the rocks get smeared out in a ductile fashion. These zones are marked by zones of quartz. The mineralization seems to be associated with these zones in some way, certainly in terms of proximity and possibly in terms of genesis.
Peter: My sense of hearing about the shear zones was that things would be simple, maybe linear in a way, but then to hear what you’re saying about the fold noses and to read about the folds as well makes it sound like it’s a little more exotic.
Tim: What we originally thought was that the whole place was chopped up by fairly linear shear zones along the carbonate margins. What we’re finding now that we’ve mapped it in detail is that they’re not real shear zones, they’re just the soft mudstones flowing around the carbonate. The carbonates are very hard, rigid blocks within what would have been originally fairly soft and ductile mudstones. When you fold these rocks tightly, the mud stones literally flow around the outside of the carbonates and that generates a fabric that looks like shearing. Technically, it is shearing, but it’s not the same kind of shearing that most geologists are familiar with, which is associated with long, linear, regional features. The shearing at Rodruin is a very localized effect caused by this ductile deformation.
Peter: Wow, thank you Tim. The image of shears in the Canadian Shield come to mind. I haven’t heard of this ductile deformation before.
Tim: It’s more of a flowing effect around the edge of the carbonates since the carbonates themselves don’t fold very well. The bigger carbonates are tightly folded in places, but the rocks often break up at the nose of the fold. They fragment, and you get fractures on the outside of the fold because the outside of the folds are under tension, but when they pull apart you get quartz developing in the voids. These are almost vertical rods of quartz that run down the nose of the fold. There seems to be mineralization associated with these, as I said.
Peter: What you’re saying about the vertical orientation there seems to match what you’re seeing with the deep underground working mentioned in the third set of sampling result from Rodruin.
Tim: Yes, that’s right. The workings that are still open and we can explore, follow these nearly vertical structures, which are always on the edge of these very complex fold noses and dislocations. The one that goes down at least 40 meters mentioned in the news release we call “Aladdin’s Slot” and we can follow that one pretty much to the bottom. We actually found an old oil lamp at the bottom of it, among other things. Interestingly enough, the mineralization there is not hosted by the carbonate – it’s hosted by the adjacent slates on the margins of the carbonate. The footwall for some of these veins is the carbonate, but the veins occur within the slates.
Javier: And that’s what you’d expect, Peter. When you have a high strain zone, you have very localized deformation around the contacts between the two very rheologically different rock types. The hard, brittle carbonates do not deform to the same extent as the softer slates which flow around the hard blocks of carbonate, and the strain is taken up within the slates that wrap around the carbonates. The strongest deformation occurs in the slates on the margins of the carbonates and that is where you find the high-grade gold mineralization, which actually fits together fairly well.
Tim: An interesting feature is that there are dykes in some of the high-grade zones that cut straight across the structures. They seem to be quite immune to the deformation that’s gone on, locally at least, which suggests they are a later set of dykes. It’s interesting that these later dykes are themselves cut by high-grade gold mineralization because that suggests there’s a large time difference between the formation of the first phase of carbonate-hosted Hamama type mineralization and the superimposition of these higher grade zones. There could be a considerable amount of time difference since the high-grade mineralization appears to postdate the peak high-strain environment.
There is some minor deformation of the dykes, not a lot, but some, and that clearly indicates there was still active tectonism going on at the time of the dyke emplacement, and it’s possible that the high-grade mineralization actually relates to the final phase of tectonism.
Quite often, at the end of mountain building or orogenic periods, you get a phase of relaxation and a process called gravitational collapse. Basically, once the strain is taken away the mountain range you’ve created during subduction literally starts to collapse. It just flows away and that creates a different stress pattern, which is a tensional regime that allows voids to open and allows fluid to migrate through them more easily.
Peter: Amazing, thank you. And are the dykes coming in after that relaxation that you’re describing there?
Tim: The fluids themselves, which are super high-grade mineralizing fluids, seem to be related to tectonic activity. When you see these high-grade quartz structures, the quartz is granular. It has some disseminated sulphides, but there are no vuggy cavities. On the other hand, there’s no evidence of shearing within the veins. To me, that says you are looking at a fairly deep mineralizing system – deep and late in the orogenic process. The final phase of the orogenic period, if you will.
The carbonates at Rodruin appear to be stratabound, as at Hamama. We found some magnificent colloform veins crosscutting the carbonates at what we think is the base of the carbonate and we interpret that as a feeder system. We believe those are the springs that basically brought this carbonate out onto the bed of the ocean at a time when it wasn’t too deep. We’re looking at only moderate water depths here. With the carbonate, came the early phase of syndepositional lower grade zinc, gold, and silver mineralization and all that was then buried under a pile of sediment and the whole lot was then folded during the orogenic period.
Much later, we believe the dykes cut through these host rocks. The dykes are heavily altered, and we can’t tell what sort of dykes they are in the field, but it is possible that they are microgranites or microdiorites. The high-grade mineralization postdates and cuts the dykes and occurs within the areas of structural complexity. The areas where you have dislocations and heavily attenuated fold noses seem to be preferred hosts for the mineralization.
Bear in mind that most of these fold axes are nearly vertical, so that the folds are likely to maintain the same plan at depth.
Javier: Please allow me to summarize and simplify what we’re talking about here, Peter.
Essentially, we’re looking at two distinct phases of mineralization. The first is effectively Hamama-style where we have mineralization within the carbonate horizons. Then, we have a strong period of orogenic activity and a second phase of structurally-controlled mineralization coming in very late in the orogenic cycle. This is largely what we thought may have occurred at Rodruin when we first found it, but now the mapping we’ve done clearly backs that up and identifies two distinct phases of mineralization, which makes Rodruin really quite different from Hamama. The second phase at Rodruin is the really exciting mineralization because it is high-grade and is not something that we see at Hamama.
Peter: With Hamama and Rodruin only 20-25 kilometers apart, I wonder how there could be so much difference in the orogenic activity after the carbonate phase was put in?
Tim: If you look at the geological maps of the two sites, the first difference that is apparent is how the strata at Rodruin have been tipped up on edge, tightly folded to an insane degree in some places to produce a zig-zag outcrop pattern. And keep in mind that the mineralization occurs at what is now a vertical contact. Presumably it was following lines of weakness generated by great zones of permeability, which were flooded with early quartz as well. At Hamama by contrast the outcrop is a fairly srat linear feature that can be followed easily over several kilometres.
Javier: We don’t have detailed geological mapping over our entire license area, Peter. There just aren’t particularly detailed geological maps here in Egypt, but Hamama lies to the west of a zone of Younger Granites. We know that the Younger Granites tended to be intruded along regional tectonic lineaments. This NNE-trending zone of Younger Granites that separates Hamama from Rodruin may represent a significant terrane boundary. We see relatively limited deformation in the areas west of the granites including Hamama, whereas to the east including the Rodruin area the rocks display typically more intense deformation. It suggests there may be different regimes in our license area.
Both Rodruin and Hamama have the carbonate-hosted background mineralization, but Rodruin has a second phase of very high-grade gold mineralization that we do not have at Hamama. It is very different geologically.
Peter: It was good to see some of the split samples you did for QA/QC. Those results showed good replicability for the high-grade gold numbers.
Javier: When we looked at some of the samples, we saw visible gold. That doesn’t mean we picked out a piece of coarse gold in any of the rocks that were sent to the laboratory, but we do know that there’s visible gold in at least one sample. When you have coarse gold, you can of course have a lot of variation in assay grades. When we send about half of kilogramme of sample to the laboratory, they pulverize the whole thing and homogenize it. I asked them to take another 25 gram split and repeat the assays. The results were of the similar to the first ones and confirmed the initial results. The laboratory also did their own QA/QC on the samples and they confirmed the presence of coarse gold in the samples.
Tim: And it’s important to note, Peter, that we don’t examine the samples we send to the laboratory. We actually take second, smaller samples which we examine under the microscope for mineralogy and that’s how we identified the visible gold in at least one of the samples.
Peter: Good to hear that you’re not cherry picking the results!
Javier: Think back to our first round of sampling when we first reported an assay of 321 grams per tonne gold. If we’d put a block of that material under the microscope, then we would have seen there was visible gold in it. That would essentially confirm it has coarse gold and suggest the potential for very high grades, but we’d still be careful with what we sent for assay. We’ve seen coarse gold from plenty of spoil lying around the old processing sites and it’s very clear that it is what the ancients were mining.
Peter: And how about the wall rock in that underground working? There’s mention of the old-timers taking out the vein and the surrounding rock being mineralized, as well, but you’ve just mentioned old spoil at surface. Have you sampled the wall rock underground?
Tim: Yes. Only the first sample came from the vein itself at the southeast end of the working. The old working is really a slot. It’s about 30-35 meters long, about 40 meters deep and up to about 5-6 meters wide at one end in the areas where it hasn’t collapsed; there may have been wider stopes.
The gold grades do continue into the wall rock, which are silicified slates and schist. Most of the 8 samples came from the wall rock material they left behind.
Javier: This sampling from the underground slot, Peter, is essentially what the underground miners left behind. They mined out the gold-bearing quartz veins, but these results represent what they left behind. We have this series of anastomosing, gold-bearing quartz veins within a background of this mineralized material. We see very high grade quartz veins now largely extracted, such as the 321 gram assay we saw from the first sampling program contained, in a background of material that we’ve sampled underground in this program. That background material is averaging about seven and half grams per tonne gold from the sampling of Aladdin’s Slot
Peter: Just to clarify – that seven gram result represents the average grade across the 8 samples taken from the wall rock in the ancient underground working.
Javier: That’s right. That was the stuff that the old guys left behind.
Peter: Wow.
Tim: We have identified very abundant visible gold from quartz vein material lying around at the ancient processing sites and dumps at Rodruin. And you may have noticed in the news release that the veins continue past the bottom of the pit, but they appear to have gotten down into fresh rock. If it was possible to mine it, then they mined it. The first sample, AHA-13644 with 15.45 grams per tonne, represents the outcrop of a vein underground but it wasn’t a very big sample simply because the rock is so hard. Anything they can get purchase on to pry out of there, they took long ago. We’re left struggling to get whatever they may have left for our samples!
Javier: That’s an important point, Peter. The reason this slot was only mined to 40 meters was because it simply became too hard for them to carry on at depth. The best sample we got from this program came from the bottom of the slot. All the evidence suggests that this mineralization continues at depth, too. This was not the end of it, but they stopped at this level was because they simply couldn’t get any further because the ground was too hard for them to mine with the technology that they had available.
Tim: That first sample was the only one that was from a vein itself. All the others were taken from stringers and such. We were pleased with the numbers that came back for those areas outside the vein, too. If the wall rock’s running seven grams, then it all looks quite promising.
Javier: When we start to drill some of these areas, we will be targeting the high-grade quartz veins that carry visible gold. We’re not sure how wide the zones are yet, but we’re hoping they will be 20-40 meters wide. That we appear to have high-grade gold veins within a background zone of considerable width with decent grades is very exciting for us. The target is very attractive, and we will see what we can achieve here. It’s early days, but things are going well.
Peter: With the surface sampling, the geological mapping, and now this underground sampling, I would think you have some sense for how to project the structures you’re targeting.
Javier: After going underground, Tim actually had a chance to see things in three dimensions, which is essential to get an idea of what may be down there. You can see the structures they were mining in three dimensions and see what material they chose not to mine. That exercise really helped our understanding of Rodruin.
Peter: How was it getting down there, Tim?
Tim: Interesting. Very interesting.
Peter: How was it getting back up?!
Tim: Even more interesting! We have ropes and equipment that the cavers use, but it’s still pretty tough.
There’s a ledge about 20 meters down, which is a nice resting point. You can actually free climb up to the ledge. From the ledge upwards, it’s a vertical slot about one and a half to two and a half meters wide, with some large fallen blocks wedged across it. It’s quite an interesting place to get in and out of.
Javier: I don’t know if you’ve ever done any ropework, Peter, but the guys who are good at it can just shimmy up a rope. You use ‘prussic’ loops which allow you to move your foot and hand up the rope together, which looks terribly easy when the experts do it, but it’s not! I’ve done it a couple of times and it’s incredibly difficult. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it in a place like that. I will leave that to the experts like Tim!
Peter: Tim, do you have a sense for how much rock you brought up? We hear about these 25 gram splits in the news release, but I wonder about the size and weight of each individual sample.
Tim: They are about three kilograms. Two to three kilograms is a typical sample from underground.
Peter: For each sample?
Tim: Yes. Keep in mind that you’ve got to get them out. When we did this underground sampling, it was still an hour and a half’s walk back to the vehicle. If you have to get all your equipment back out and take all your samples with you, then that limits what you can take. The other thing was the temperature underground. You might think it’s cooler because it’s underground, but it isn’t. It gets hot and stuffy down there – sweat dripping off your elbows and stuff.
Javier: It’s not an hour and half’s walk in the park either, Peter.
Peter: The Eastern Desert of Egypt!
Tim: That’s right. And we actually had to take some large pieces of wood to hang the rope from something! We used timber stemples to wedge across the gap, which you have to carry site of course. Getting those two five-foot posts to Rodruin by foot was quite a task.
Javier: I was on break when we were organizing this, and I had in my head that you’d park the pickup truck at the top of the hole and just belay off it, but obviously that’s not the case. We couldn’t get the pickup to within about three kilometers when we did this program!
Peter: Great work. Thanks to the field team!
Javier: Tim, Paul, and all the local guys did an absolutely fantastic job getting it done.
Peter: And do you see the carbonates at Hamama in these workings at Rodruin?
Tim: Yes, yes you do. It’s quite striking really. In some pits, one entire side of the pit is in carbonates. There’s another pit we call the “hemimorphite pit”, which is at the far eastern end of the South Ridge. It’s a smaller pit that may be seven or eight meters long by half a meter to three meters wide. It sort of spirals down, but basically twists and turns down along the contact. The roof there slopes at about 70 degrees and that has been heavily gossanized, and is very zinc-rich, hence the name the hemimorphite pit.
Peter: That’s not in this 40m deep underground working, is it?
Tim: No, it’s at the other end of the South Ridge. The hemimorphite pit is approximately 20 meters deep.
The complexity of these underground workings makes surveying them very difficult. We made a sketch survey of the 40m deep slot on the western hill that we’ve been calling Aladdin’s Slot, but it’s extremely difficult to get into the outer recesses of these slots. They look to be quite extensive, but they’re very difficult to get into. We haven’t put any information about them into the press releases yet because we haven’t been in them, but we know they are there. The sketches we’ve made so far are preliminary, but we will endeavor to complete proper surveys there when we get access.
Peter: Okay. Thanks for clarifying that this 40m working is not just a single slot, but that it has stuff going off to the sides too.
Tim: Yes, they are quite complex.
Javier: We can say that it’s not a simple, single vein. It’s a zone of anastomosing veins within a background of mineralized rock.
Tim: And quite often there are two sets. In fact, all of the sites have two sets of veins crossing almost at right angles and, of course, both sets are mineralized. The old timers would go down one vein, come across another one, and then suddenly turn at right angles off somewhere else. I wonder if that isn’t something to do with why the workings are there in the first place. They’re exceedingly complex.
Javier: Another thing to mention, Peter, is that we found some interesting archaeological artefacts down in the deep slot, Aladdin’s Slot, as we’re calling it. I was in Cairo at the time and Tim sent me an email saying, “We found skeletons down the slot.” I was concerned because I instantly thought they were human skeletons, but it turned out they were birds, snakes, and such. We’ve also found some ancient oil lamps down it, hence the name Aladdin’s Slot.
Peter: Really!
Tim: There also appears to be a shaft going up vertically from part of the deep workings that doesn’t come to the surface or where the surface expression has been buried.
Peter: There could be all kinds of stuff going on underground that you don’t know about yet.
Tim: Yes. We’ve only partially explored the deep pit.
What makes Aladdin’s Slot good is that the walls of the workings are very stable. There are a few bits that have fallen off the wall, but they have wedged in. There appear to be other deep workings in the area, but they have generally collapsed or filled in with debris.
Peter: And for anyone looking at the news release, you can see one red triangle at this underground working but there are actually 8 samples there. Several of which would count as purple triangles based on your mapping conventions here!
Javier: Yes, the 8 samples show on top of each other on the map as we allocated them all the same coordinates. We have not attempted to allocate them accurate XYZ cords, GPS’s don’t work very well underground!
Tim: When we get road access up there, we’ll probably do a survey of the underground workings and then be able to give proper 3-D coordinates of the underground samples. At the moment, that’s not possible so they’ve all got the same coordinates in terms of the surface expression.
Peter: Very exciting.
Javier: It’s all going very well. We’re happy with progress, especially bearing in mind it’s still a remote location. We hope we’ll actually be able to drive to the western end within about two or three weeks’ time, but we’ve already done a lot of work over the last three or four months. The guys have spent a lot of time tramping up and down the mountainsides. Again, I think Tim, Paul and all our local Egyptian team have done a fantastic job to have progressed this discovery this far already. I think we’ve got a good understanding and are in a good place now to do some more work there. We’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s happening up there and what we want to do next.
We’re moving towards Ramadan and we’re going to shut the camp down over Ramadan. It’s been up to 40 degrees centigrade the last couple of weeks again, which is getting pretty warm now. We can’t work during the day because we’ve got our local guys cannot who drink water during the day during Ramadan, so it’s just not practical.
We’ll have the road in soon and hopefully will have started work on drill pads and construction by the time Ramadan starts. We will then shut down for the month over Ramadan and come back after the Eid celebration at the end. We hope to be in a position to start drilling fairly soon after Ramadan, say around the end of June to start drilling. Everything’s basically proceeding according to plan at Rodruin and things are looking pretty good.
Peter: The sampling coverage is huge. It’s been a great win for the initial program.
Javier: Well, the mineralization is spread over a very large area. It’s difficult terrain, but once we get some vehicles and excavators up there, we’ll be able to start cutting roads around the place and we can actually sample and map the road cuttings. All of that will give us a better idea of what we’re looking at in terms of the geology of the area. There’s a lot of mineralization over a large area, which is one of the things that makes us so excited about Rodruin.
Peter: I can just imagine a nice trenching program coming soon to Rodruin! The Central Valley: any new thoughts on that?
Tim: The Central Valley appears to exist because of erosion. The cleavage of the slate runs down the edge of the valley and it appears to be heavily weathered slate. In the center of the valley, the slates are carbonate altered in many areas and this make some very friable or fragile rocks. You can actually see how the valley winds around and follows the cleavage of the slate, and I think it was just preferential weathering that generated the valley.
Javier: Tim has been doing the geological mapping up there, Peter, and much of it, certainly on the north flank of the South Ridge, is on very steep hillsides that are covered so you can’t actually see the bedrock. The hills are covered in scree and talus, but what we can see is intensely folded. We can see it’s a very structurally deformed area, but we only have limited exposure. You can’t really see what’s happening to a lot of it. We know that it’s structurally complex, but it’s too early to put a full interpretation onto what’s actually there because we can only see maybe 10-20% of the exposure.
Tim: The exposure of the North Ridge is better than the South. Exposure on the southern side of the North Ridge is nearly complete because it’s so steep, but the area is small. The main problem with cover is on the South Ridge. There is something like a cemented scree. The carbonates in an arid environment like this eventually stick together like concrete – it even looks like concrete.
Peter: Well, that makes it all the more impressive for the large number of gold-rich samples you’ve found so far at surface on the South Ridge. The north side of the South Ridge it may not have a lot of exposure but you’ve sure had some joy there.
Tim: When you do get exposure, there is excellent mineralization. That has largely been Hamama style in the area you’re referring to – the gold-zinc gossanous material.
Javier: Peter, there could be blind mineralization that the ancients didn’t find that is buried under this cemented scree. We don’t know about that yet, but we believe it’s perfectly reasonable to surmise that there could be a lot more mineralization that’s simply not exposed at this point.
Tim: And in the purely structurally-controlled high-grade zones there is no reason why they have to continue all the way to what is presently the surface. There is a good possibility that there are other completely unknown and unexposed high-grade zones hidden at depth. The only way we’ll find those is by drilling holes.
Javier: We’re literally scratching the surface here, Peter.
Peter: And to confirm – are these grab samples you’ve reported in these first 3 phases generally taken from exposed bedrock or this transported material?
Tim: They’re taken from either exposed bedrock or old workings. A few of the grab samples are taken from the spoil left behind by the old miners, but most are from exposed bedrock. There are literally hundreds of little pits all over the place at Rodruin. Maybe not surprisingly, they give some of the best grades.
Javier: Tim was up there yesterday on the North Ridge and found massive blocks – table-sized blocks of high-grade mineralization in the scree on the northern side. We didn’t sample them because they weren’t in situ, but we have sampled similar material high on the North Ridge and found high-grade gold. We believe these blocks that have come down the ridge clearly suggest that there may be a larger area of high-grade mineralization further up the ridge, which may have limited exposure. It’s pretty inaccessible up there, but we believe it offers a good opportunity to find significant new zones of high-grade mineralization along the north side of the North Ridge that may not be exposed.
Tim: The north face of the North Ridge is basically a cliff face. It slopes at about seventy degrees and sheds large blocks. It’s exceedingly difficult to get on top of it and map it.
Peter: Maybe some drone tech to help you out there! And with the mapping you have done, how much other ground have you covered?
Tim: Wherever you can get to, we’ve mapped. We’ve mapped the whole site now, pretty well wherever there is exposure. The exposure on the northern face of the North Ridge is excellent, so we got a fairly good handle on what’s up there. The top fifty meters on the North Ridge is inaccessible, but you can get a good idea of what’s in it from the scree.
Peter: Yes. And did you say that you encountered the carbonates somewhere at surface on the South Ridge?
Tim: Yes, they basically form the crest line of the South Ridge. The crest line of that ridge has carbonates all along it. The workings on the northern side of the South Ridge tend to be on the carbonates. Things are more complex on the North Ridge. The structures actually cross the ridge line there, so you get an alternating sequence along the crest line of the ridge between carbonates and slates.
Peter: And how about the fact that we see high-grade gold numbers along the crest of the South Ridge where you see carbonates. Is that where you see some contact separating them? I believe you alluded to the high-grade and the carbonate being in close proximity there.
Tim: Yes. In the western hill by Aladdin’s Slot, you can quite easily distinguish between what they were mining in the pits and the carbonates. They’re right up to each other. The mineralization in the carbonate is more or less continuous with the veins.
Originally, we thought that meant the veins were re-mobilized from the carbonate, but now we’re not so sure. It’s possible that the carbonates are the source of the metals in the high-grade mineralization – it could have been re-mobilized into these low-stress regimes at the very end of the orogenic process but there are a few geochemical distinctions that suggest that’s not the case. There’s a lot more arsenic and antimony in the high-grade mineralization, which makes me think it’s a separate phase.
Javier: There’s a much stronger relationship between gold and silver in the shear-hosted mineralization, Peter. That geochemical differences between the carbonate-hosted and the structurally controlled mineralization seem quite distinct from the work we’ve done so far.
Tim: And that raises a very interesting point, which we haven’t touched on yet. Do these high-grade zones have to be associated with the edge of the carbonate? Are there other potential structures that could host it? We don’t know the answer yet. We haven’t found any high-grade away from the carbonates yet, but it is possible.
Peter: Right. And that fits with what you were saying about not knowing what was going on undercover.
Tim: Absolutely, yeah.
Javier: As an exploration project without a single drill hole, it’s still early days.
Peter: Well, it’s coming together well. The geochemistry evidence to support two phases of mineralization is a good start. And the statistics from this recent news on the underground sampling program were great – all eight samples above 1 gram per tonne gold and half above five grams. Not bad!
Javier: I think it’s very significant, Peter. It’s firmed up our ideas on what we believe we’re looking at. It also gives us confidence that the mineralization is not purely within narrow quartz veins, it extends into the host rocks. Given the amount of workings in this area and the grades we are seeing around the quartz veins, there could be a substantial body of decent mineralization here that the ancients never touched. Of course, they worked the quartz veins that they could find exposed in surface, but they certainly haven’t taken everything.
Peter: Can’t wait to see what might be happening at depth!
Javier: The fact that these folds are vertical means they’re basically plunging straight down. We expect the high grade structurally controlled mineralization will also extend downwards for considerable distances.
Tim: Imagine that the original mineralization consisted of a blanket of carbonate on the seabed over quite a broad area. It was thicker in the center and thins towards the edges. It even splits into several layers in some places, which you can actually see in some places. At the center of the South Ridge, the carbonate is very thick. It has a footwall colloform spring zone, where we interpret the coliform banding as an epithermal spring system underneath the carbonate. As you go out towards the ends of the ridge, you can see the folded beds of carbonate become now quite thin, only three to five meters thick. And then the whole lot has just been folded, tipped on one edge and then very tightly folded.
Peter: Interesting that you can see that variation just across the South Ridge. I typically think of these changes in thickness occurring over several kilometers.
Javier: Well, that probably happened too. A lot of it comes back to the origin of the carbonates, which is a question we have been puzzling over at Hamama for a long period of time. What are these carbonates? One thing we’ve managed to identify clearly at Rodruin is a number of different types of carbonate rocks. We’re now starting to put together a model that includes these different types of carbonate. Some could be deposited, others actually look like sedimentary carbonates, and others still look like chemical sediments. All this fits with our broad-scale VMS epithermal seafloor model, but the variety there may actually give us more evidence to actually back that idea up in this area. Again, this is only the first stage of mineralization at Rodruin, the Hamama style mineralization in the carbonates.
And on top of that we’ve got the high-grade gold mineralization, which comes much later in the piece, and makes Rodruin the really attractive prospect that it is.
Peter: And do we have a sense for what takes us from the ocean floor to the orogenic setting?
Tim: No, not really.
Javier: Maybe not in the specifics, Peter, but this type of tectonic activity we’re discussing is typical for the Arabian-Nubian Shield. A series of ocean basins have opened and closed here, associated with island volcanism. As the basins close, the rocks get crushed up together and massively deformed. There’s nothing exceptional in what we’re seeing at Rodruin, as part of the overall ANS system.
Tim: One interesting feature that we’ve noticed during mapping is that there’s a lot less evidence of volcanics at Rodruin than Hamama. There are some quite large rhyolite bodies at the west end of the South Ridge, but generally much less than Hamama. The volcanics we do see at Rodruin are certainly early because they’re heavily cleaved along the margins, but their exact relationship to the mineralization unclear. There’s not the same pile of identifiable volcanic material that you get at Hamama, which is very definitely in a volcanic setting.
Javier: A substantial number of VMS systems are actually sitting in sedimentary host rock sequences, which is not unusual in itself. Rodruin is located in an environment characterised by more terrigenous sedimentary deposition rather than volcanic activity. Rodruin is clearly similar to Hamama, but it’s also distinctly different in many ways.
On a broad scale, the carbonate-hosted mineralization fits into the broad group of carbonate-related VMS-epithermal deposits we have identified at Abu Marawat that includes Hamama, Waayrah, and Miranda, but Rodruin is different because it has the later phase of high-grade structurally controlled gold mineralization in addition. The two phases of mineralization are essential. We do not see anything at Hamama like the grades we’re seeing at Rodruin. It’s a different beast.
Disclaimer
This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
The technical information contained in this News Release was prepared by Roderick Cavaney BSc, MSc (hons), MSc (Mining & Exploration Geology), FAusIMM, GSA, SME, Vice President, Exploration, of Aton Resources Inc. Mr. Cavaney is a qualified person (QP) under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.
Peter Bell has been compensated to prepare and distribute this promotional material.
