Seabridge Gold unveiled that this year's first drill results from the Deep Kerr deposit at its 100% owned KSM Project in northwestern British Columbia have confirmed an expansion of the deposit in an area being evaluated for low cost, underground block cave mining.
Hole K-15-49 intercepted 483 meters averaging 0.43 g/T gold and 0.56% copper including a 250 meter interval grading 0.49 g/T gold and 0.70% copper. This new hole is a step-out located 400 meters down dip from hole K-14-45, drilled in 2014, which returned 286 meters of 0.45 g/T gold and 0.77% copper.
A follow-up daughter hole, K-15-49A, is now in progress to test the mineralized zone between these two intersections. The results are expected to increase resources.
In the past two years, Seabridge has successfully targeted higher grade zones beneath KSM’s near-surface porphyry deposits, resulting in the discovery of Deep Kerr and the Iron Cap Lower Zone, two copper-rich deposits that have added nearly one billion tonnes of better grade to project resources.
The program this year at Deep Kerr was designed to confirm the continuity of the mineralized zone below the simulated block cave shape used to constrain Deep Kerr resources. An area in the north-central part of the Kerr deposit was selected to test the potential of this extension.
Seabridge Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk said: "we continue to expand the limits of Deep Kerr while enhancing grade. More importantly, we are growing the deposit by finding continuous, thick intervals of better grade material in favorable orientations, all of which support the potential for efficient extraction. Deep Kerr has very few equals for size, grade and mineability and it keeps getting better."
The holes in this year’s Deep Kerr program are being collared well outside the mineral deposit in order to achieve the deep intersections that test the dip extension. These locations better defined the western limits of the mineralized system, and demonstrate that a north-south trending normal fault places unaltered fine-grained sedimentary rock against the outer weakly mineralized parts of the mineral system.
As the drill holes advance to the east, alteration and mineralization increase as a series of potassically-altered intrusions are encountered. Drill hole K-15-49 passed out of the intensely altered and mineralized zone into younger intrusions with lower concentrations of gold and copper. The drill hole was not extended into the eastern high-grade zone encountered in previous shallower drilling because projected depths would have been prohibitive. This eastern zone remains a high potential target.
Drill holes were oriented using historical information and were designed to intercept the mineralized target at right angles to the strike of the zone. The orientation will be refined with additional drilling but current information indicates the intervals listed above approximate the true thickness of the mineralized zones.
Seabridge holds a 100% interest in several North American gold projects. The Company’s principal assets are the KSM Project located near Stewart, British Columbia, Canada and the Courageous Lake gold project located in Canada’s Northwest Territories.