Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:25 I do have to bring your statement to this, or your attention to this forward-looking statement advisory, as this presentation may contain forward-looking statements. So what we're going to look at today is really sort of 4 little updates. One of them, the first one we'll look at is what we call an airborne magnetic survey over CSM or Cape St. Mary's properties. That'll be followed by an update on what's happening at Root & Cellar, particularly the Crest and Copper target. A little bit more about the new interpretation of the Gold at Conquest at Root & Cellar. Then a very brief update on some work that we've been doing at the Fortune property, which is one of the new claim groups, again, for porphyry, Copper and epithermal Gold located on the Buren, about 25km north of Rutan Cellar.
1:16 So Firstly, as mentioned, an update on CSM, Cape St. Mary's. First of all, before we get into the details of that project, how did we get to Cape St. Mary's? As things were developing at Root & Sellader, we were looking for other porphyry potential. Wherever you get one of these porphyry epithermal systems, you usually get more. So obviously, one of them is Fortune, which we'll talk about later. But the other one is CSM. And for a long time, we've been talking about what we think is a rift system cutting this portion of the Buren Peninsula. The background image is DEM, digital elevation. So you can very clearly see there's a swath here in the root and cellar area of lowland. You see the same sort of break on the magnetic pattern. So there's something very distinct cutting through the Buren Peninsula in this area. We're thinking it's a rift or a zone of extension.
2:06 You see it on the geophysics, you see it on the topography. And based on the orientation of that and the Buren, it projected across Placentia Bay here onto the Avalon Peninsula, about 50 kilometres to the east. And so we felt that this rifting system could be important for the porphyry potential of 30 root and sallow in the Pirin Peninsula. So we wanted to start looking elsewhere. And this rift system seemed to project across the Bay to Cape St. Mary's. And so when we looked at existing government data in that area, it was very, very limited, but 1 set of data they have of course is till samples and lake sediment samples. And that area very clearly showed up as anomalous in Copper as indicated by these green dots in the left-hand map. These are the same sort of concentrations and basically anomalous values as a prospector used to originally focus in on Rutan Seller. So a very distinct cluster of Copper anomalies.
3:07 As I say, some of them are also corresponding to some of the pathfinder elements you would expect to see with a porphyry Copper system, in this case Molybdenite. And again, so you see a strong correlation, Copper, Molybdenite, there's even a little bit of Lithium, which sometimes you get in the upper portions of these porphyry systems. So it had a little bit of a Copper porphyry signature and that rift zone sort of trended across the Placentia Bay and cut the Southern portion of the Avalon. We wanted to look at potential of Porphyry not just on the Beer Irn, but on the neighbouring peninsula. That's why we originally started staking ground in that area. We've just completed an airborne survey. We'll have a little bit of a bigger look at it in the next slide. But I say Porphyry Copper is one of the targets at Cape St. Mary's. We're also looking for Nickel as we'll look at in a minute.
3:56 But here's a pretty neat magnetic target that popped out from the survey, which has actually just been completed. A very strong magnetic low. Now this may be remnant magnetism. We won't get into the detail of that right now, but sort of a classic magnetic low, magnetic high in the middle, approximately 200 or 300m in diameter. So this could be an ideal porphyry Copper target. The other interesting thing to note too is the orientation of this structure, probably a dike filling that structure. And it's the same orientation as we go back to the previous slide, it's the same orientation as this projected RIF system. So we believe whatever this is, is being controlled by that RIF fault system.
4:42 So Porphyry Copper is one of the targets we are exploring there, But there's also potential for Nickel because we look at those exact same Copper anomalies we just looked at with these green dots, nearly all of them also correspond to very high Nickel, as you can see by these blue squares that sit underneath the green dots. And so on the regional geology map, again, this area is very poorly understood, perhaps even less understood than the Buren Peninsula. But this purple polygon geological unit is Gabbro. So obviously, these are a classic rock type that would host Nickel, Copper, Cobalt and PGE. So these are actually sills and they're actually slightly folded. So that's why you get that pattern, but a fairly large complex of gabbroic sills. And you can see how strongly the nickel copper and just cobalt here, it's not shown here, but there is cobalt associated with these same anomalies, how close do they correspond to this gebroic sill complex?
5:36 And so this was part of the magnetics that we've just completed over CSM. Again, a very, I don't want to say noisy, but very active pattern to the east of this zone here. It looks like there's a contact in here. These anomalies here correspond to these ones coming down to the west side of this sill complex. One of the very interesting things in here are some of these areas of blue that we usually associate blue, the cold colours in magnetics as to magnetic lows. Some of these are probably not true magnetic lows. These are actually what we call remnant magnetism, where sometimes certain minerals will actually inherit the Earth's magnetism at the time they form. Now, the Earth's magnetic pole flip-flops over its history quite regularly, but most rocks retain the magnetism of the current day, but sometimes they act sort of as a frozen compass.
6:29 And so some of these rocks we know formed at the time when the magnetic pole was at the South Pole. And there's only really a few minerals that can cause this and that's magnetite. And the other one is a type of pyrrhotite, which you often get associated with blue Nickel deposits. So gabbros often contain magnetite, either primary magnetite or it's an alteration product of the olivine. But these are either being caused or most likely being caused by either magnetite or pyritite. And so if it is pyritite, that's pretty exciting because again, all Nickel, Copper, Cobalt and magmatic deposits are associated with pyrrhotate.
7:11 This is very recently completed. The processing is still underway, but a lot of remnant magnetism. We know that this is probably coming from the gabbroic sills and again you can see how some of the stronger anomalies up here correspond to remnant magnetism. So is this is this an indication of sulfides within the gabbroic sill? Another strong anomaly down here you can see some remnant magnetism associated with that anomaly as well. So early indications, it's a lot more work to do here, but it's a very interesting magnetic signature. This is an area of very, I say, poor outcrop exposures, a lot of lowland and bog, but the magnetic pattern is encouraging, certainly with those remnant magnetic lows that suggest either magnetite or pyritate.
8:01 The other interesting thing you see is a lot of these little, again, little magnetic lines in here, these, but again, would be dikes. We believe that they are Gaborulloch dikes as well, and they also match that orientation of that rift system. So we believe that rift system is real and it's basically being flooded in, in the case of the Avalon drain with these Gabrielic dikes. Some of them may be filling these sills. You can see how some of these dikes seem to stop. Particularly this one, it's cutting across and it stops at the layer of this remnant magnetism. So perhaps that's a feeder to whatever is creating this magnetic anomaly here. So chasing 2 very different deposit models here. One is porphyry Copper and the other is Nickel Copper Cobalt.
8:47 The Avalon terrain is not classic terrain for magmatic Nickel-Copper, but when you see that this association of very strong coincident Nickel-Copper-Cobalt anomalies overlying a map Gebroic sills, it's not something that you can walk away from, especially on this sort of scale where these sales are on the order of 10km long. So 2, I'd say, very different deposit types, 1 Nickel Copper Cobalt and the other 1 Porphyry Copper. And the other sort of intriguing thing about this Nickel target is the Voisier base melter at Long Harbour, Newfoundland is only located about 70km north of this property. So moving on to Capes and Marys now back to Root & Cellar. As I say, we're chasing both Porphy Copper at Root & Cellar and Epithermal Gold. These are end members of the same system.
9:41 We'll have a quick look at that in the next slide, just as a reminder. But the focus right now is the Porphy Copper target at Creston. In the past, a lot of the work has been done at Conquest for the Gold. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, but it's part of a complete epithermal porphyry Copper system. We believe there's another system over here. Why is that? Well, partly we got intermediate sulphide here, so that's often closer to your porphyry centres. And so yet, this type of mineralization is too far to be sourced from Creston. So those are probably another porphyry centre here. We do actually have a float sample running about 1.5% Copper with Gold and Silver just north of here. And again, Kelstone, this is one of the projects we picked up from some prospectors recently. They have a lot of alteration minerals, including 1 called Perophilite just up in here.
10:38 Again, that's associated with porphyry Copper. And we're seeing the same sort of signature of rocks here, both Gold and Lead Zinc, as we're seeing just South of the Preston Copper target. So we believe there's another porphyry centre up here, and that's all surrounded by these intermediate and low-saltidation Gold systems. So Isaiah, here's just a quick reminder for you, those unfamiliar with porphyrite Copper and epithermal Gold, they are end members of the same system. You basically have an intrusive body at depth. You have a very large chamber, magnetic chamber, much deeper down. Off of that, you have sort of a puff Caesar or stocks of that same magmatic body coming closer to surface.
11:23 And it's at the top of those that you get the Copper mineralization. And as those fluids cool and go to the side and to surface, that's where you're getting first your intermediate Sulphide Gold systems, and then further away you get your Low, but they are end members of the same system. So moving on to Creston, which is where we're really focused right now. What is Creston? It's a 2km diameter Copper target that's based on soil samples as indicated by these green circles and the squares are grab samples, either float samples or outcropping surface. As you can see, some pretty high-grade Copper, up for 10.5% up to the north of the target. This is actually Chalco site, but much of it is being exposed in these quarries down here. And here you have Conquest on the fringe of the Crest and Copper target and drop zone here, which is intermediate sulphide, is right up adjacent to the boundary.
12:17 It has a classic signature of porphyry systems. It's got what we call these sort of halo anomalies or shoulder anomalies. These are anomalies in particularly in arsenic, Lead, Zinc, Antimony, some Tellurium. You also have very distinct tellurium and soil anomaly sitting directly on top of that Copper target. So this is a pretty classic signature for porphyry Copper, and particularly the tellurium is indicative of an alkaline driven system. In the centre of that porphyry target outlined here in yellow is a diatrium breccia complex. These are often associated with very large porphyry Copper and epithermal Gold systems. So to have that almost in the dead centre of the Copper target, again, is very encouraging and it's sort of pointing to a potential porphyry sitting somewhere underneath it or very close by.
13:09 And just to further to that, you know, we've been both, I said the most of that, those diatreme breccias exposed in quarries down in here, but we've been doing a lot more field work. All these triangles, pink triangles around here are outcrops of the diatreme breccia. And some of this was just located about 2 weeks ago when our crew were out in the field. And including that we found actually the contact between the dietary and bread share. You can see the contrast between this sort of purple-beige rock on the right, that's horizontal flow-bounded rhyolite. And then we have the dietary and bread share that's cutting up through that. So that's up in this area here. And so that's one of the first times we've actually seen a very distinct contact between the Diatrium breccia and the Country Rock. We did find a little bit of Copper mineralization as well, sitting up in here. So it's this area that we're focusing on that the Diatrium breccias are probably representing the top of that intrusive stock.
14:05 And hopefully that leads down to a Copper-Pour-Free system. And so we're running a survey. Here's a layout of the grid right now. All these dots are both the transmitters and the receivers for a 3D IP survey. This is a very different survey than what we ran on Conquest years ago, which is more 2D survey. That survey should take about 3 weeks to complete. Obviously, a lot of processing of that data after that. You're standing over here on surface at the conquest trench, looking about 10 degrees down towards the East, Northeast. So it's probably something like this, where we're getting mineralization coming up the structure. We seem to be getting at a contact between basaltic flows and basaltic tufts are 2 different geological units. So it may be flooding out a little bit along that contact and that's where it's really pooling. So it's not a sheet-like body. It's more like a tube that's plunging down to the eastern face. So this will be a rough cross-section as if you look down in here. So now we can go back and look at a lot of the other IP and now it begins to make sense that these are not vertical plugs or sheets.
15:15 They're sort of like a tube and now it's a matter of hitting it where certain structures intersect. So I'd say it was very, very interesting that the AI predicted the trends simply based on the geochemistry and the Gold values in drill core and rock samples, but it very much matched what we were seeing on a local scale at root and cellar, both the magnetics and the IP. And interesting too, if you back off even more from that, these trend lines here in the green dash lines are structures we've picked off in the past from regional magnetics. And again, you can see how the trend line, as indicated by the white, predicted by AI, matches these regional trends in structures that we've picked off the regional magnetics.
16:02 Again, more clearly on our general property layout map, we've predicted these corridors and these corridors at both root and cellar and fortune trend, very similar directions, East, North East, almost exactly parallel to the trend of the AI. So, you know, it doesn't appear that that was just some random or fluke number it came up. I say it matches the magnetics and the IP on a local scale and it matches these big regional structures. So, again, very encouraging to have multiple datasets supporting the interpretation. So moving quickly on to Fortune, again, you can see the trend up in here. All these coloured dots are here are known Copper pore free alteration zones, systems, the yellows are related to Gold, the red are sort of unsure.
16:50 But again, that structural corridor matches exactly what we see at Root Cellar, which matches what the trend line predicted by AI for the continuation of that Gold system there. We've acquired or in the process of acquiring a whole bunch of satellite hyperspectral data over the Bering Peninsula. This sort of uses different wavelengths to pick out potential alteration minerals. The map on the left is a zoom in from in and around the Stewart area. This filter is supposed to be very good at picking out Alanite, which is an alteration mineral associated with both the epithermal Gold and porphyry Copper. It's not too far away from Stewart, but there's a very clear glowing on this filter, the hyperspectral filter, quite close to Stewart. And again, it follows this North-South structure, which you know is one of the important structures, along with that East North-East structure, it is important in controlling the minimization in the Bureau of Peninsula. In fact, you can see some of those East Northeast structures up in here. So we're still in the process of gathering that data and having a specialist process it. And we'll use that to help guide. It's not, Every one of these coloured dots is not, is surely not a alumite alteration in this case, but so you have to get into quite detailed and painstaking work of picking through these different filter layers.
18:13 But there's no doubt that within this dataset, there's information telling you where there's alteration zones in the Buren Peninsula. So this one is this one that popped off right off the bat. It's quite big, about 1.5km long. I'd say it's quite close to Stewart. So this is a target that we'll be following up hopefully over the next week or 2 to see if it supports what we're seeing in the hyperspectral image. So this is a fairly cheap way of quickly evaluating targets. It's kind of like geophysics. It's never a slam dunk, a smoking gun, but it's just another tool that we use to try to zoom in onto certain targets. And just as this is a classic, it's a very good example of a target to focus in on quite quickly.
19:00 And again, we can calibrate this, particularly in the fortune trend, where there's a whole bunch of known occurrences. We can go in there and validate these to see if these known occurrences show up on these different alteration maps. But there's about 30 of these different layers that pick out different alteration minerals, and we'll be going through those in the coming days and following up on that. Very clear target, very close to the Stewart target. So where does that lead us? The 3D geophysics is underway at Creston. The big thing is that will give us a drill target for a drill program currently planned for 2,000m to 3,000m. And we'll probably actually do a few drill holes on Conquest to test that 073 trend that AI picked out and is matching on the geophysics.
19:50 Airborne Magnetics is completed over Cape St. Mary's. Still got to do a little bit more modelling and filtering of that, but at least gives us now some specific targets to follow up on the ground. And so they'll both be reconnaissance, prospecting and mapping and some more tool sampling at both Fortune and Cape St. Mary's based on that. So that really concludes my sort of update for today. So what we're really looking forward to is seeing that 3D IP geophysics over Creston in a few weeks time. So that really concludes my presentations. And if you have any questions, I will be happy to try to answer them. Awesome, and so there's already some questions in the chat, but if you don't mind, there's a couple I'm gonna throw at you first. One thing I wanted to zoom out just before we get into some of the details of what you just went through. I know you spent your career exploring across Canada and internationally.
20:42 I want you to look back to when you first walked into Root & Seller. What was the moment or observation that told you this was something more than just one more epithermal showing in Newfoundland? It was really the alteration. I mean, just so everybody understands, when you have mineralization and you have anything that's pore-free, epithermal Gold, the surrounding rocks are changed by the fluids pumping through them. And that's particularly the case with epithermal Gold and porphyry Copper. And these rocks are so altered, they're hard to recognize. And that's, that's somewhat creates a problem because we actually have, we know we have different phases of Gold mineralization and alteration and the Copper. And so they often, they overlap and over print. So that was a problem. So I'm trying to decipher that, but it was the alteration. I mean, You drive down the highway outside of Marys Town, you see the same rocks, but they're not altered. And you get within what's now the root and sell property, they're highly, highly altered. And so that was the real kicker of why we wanted to take a closer look at this property. Obviously, the prospector found a lot of spectacular pay to mineralization, the Gold, the Silver, but it was really the alteration that jumped out at the time, widespread and very, very intensive alteration. That's really one of the key ingredients that got us in there.
22:05 Then as we sort of marched through that sort of due diligence, the other thing was that rift or whatever you want to call it on cutting the beer in Peninsula. And then later on we found out that tellurium, and again that was a pretty key moment because tellurium are solubility with typically very large epithermal gold systems and an alkalic drift and you just don't find that everywhere. So that was one of the second rule pivot points as to when we thought we were on to something significant. Awesome. Appreciate that. And I know the deck you shared, it drew comparisons to Dacadia and Lopanto for our Southeast. Obviously some pretty big tier 1 names. For an investor hearing that and getting excited, my question is, where do you think root and seller still has to prove itself before that comparison really lands?
22:54 Well, yeah, we're not comparing ourselves to the size, the grade of Gatier or Lopentz. What we're trying to show is, I mean, part of the reason is we compare it to these larger bodies, just because they've been studied more. So there's more information about them that I and others can compare our systems to. So, you know, we obviously got to see the geolysics and drill Preston, but it has, it's starting to have some of the signature, you know, particularly at Root & Seller, it's what we call alkalic. And so these do form very large porphyry systems. Often they are very Gold-rich. They are the ones that have Tellurium. And it is very different from looking at Stewart, for instance, where you actually see that big, rusty Lithocap. We didn't talk about it today, but it is one of the things that drawn people to the Stewart project before that. The alteration cap that sits above porphyry Copper systems. And they focused on drilling that rather than what they should be drilling is the porphyry target underneath. So it's a different system. So it's important to understand these because again, early on, you know, we just talked about the alteration.
24:00 Copper porphyry targets have a fairly distinct zonation as you move from the outside, what we call propolytic Green rock into different shells and ultimately into the Potassic core of these systems. But we were always a little bit confused, why were we jumping from this propolytic, the Green rock, right to the Potassic, the pink alteration zone that typically you find in the middle. Often there are several zones going into that and we were wondering why. But like Cadia, Cadia doesn't have that classic zonation because it's an alkalic system. That's part of the reason why we compare it to that is because not so much for the promotional point of view, it's just understanding what we're dealing with. We all hope we have another Cadia or another Lepanto, but Cadia is more of the geological comparison because it is sort of alkalic or your root cell may not be truly alkalic, so maybe what we call high potassium sub-alkalic, but it's the same thing.
24:55 You get these tellurium and you get a different alteration system, so it's important to understand that. Otherwise we may be chasing, looking for that other alteration zone when the core is sitting right there. And the other similarities we have with cadias, they have an effect there they call reddening, which is a type of alteration. It's a mixture of hematite alteration, which is sort of orangey, brick red, and potassium alteration, which is pink. And we see that exact same phenomenon at root and silver. A lot of the rocks, they originally were green or black, and now they're being reddened. And again, this may be another similarity to KDA. Awesome, no, appreciate it. One interesting thing I found, and I love how much Geos are having fun with AI, but the AI-driven reinterpretation at Conquest is genuinely interesting, because to me it solved a problem that traditional methods couldn't get there.
25:48 How much of this to you is a one-off win versus totally changing the way you're going to approach target generation across the rest of the district? Well, we don't know right now. To be honest, we'll find out. We'll be playing around with it, right? But, you know, I've been sceptical a little bit about AI in the past and the same with some of our geologists. I guess there's 2 things. First of all, I don't want to say it's garbage in, garbage out, But if you ask a general question, you're going to get a general answer, essentially. But the more information you pump in there, the more you kind of quiz it, that's when things really started to sort of snowball for us. And we got an answer that we felt was confident just because of the data that was fed into the AI system. But we also kept the geophysics out because we wanted to see if it came up independently with something that made geological sense. And so if you fed it the geophysics at that time, you don't know what's guiding its decision making. But the fact that it came out in this case with a trend strictly based on geochemistry from drill core rock samples that match the geophysics, not just the magnetics, but the IP and then the regional magnetics.
27:12 It gives you a lot of confidence that there's, there's method to the madness. So we will use it at day. Yeah, of course we'll use it again. I think you don't want to ignore it. But you got to be careful how you use it and you got to question it. You got to continue questioning it. But yeah, quite an interesting sort of introduction to AI, I have to admit. Yeah, no, awesome. One thing I wanted to ask, I know I have 2 questions about Cape St. Mary's, because first is it's about 50 kilometers away from root and cellar along what you're calling a possible RIF system, which is a big claim. What would it take to confirm that link? And if it holds up, what does that mean for the scale of what you're sitting on now? Well, yes, scale. It's not that one system of root and cellar is extending itself across there. You know, Like anywhere you go to the Chilean Andes, you have a whole series of deposits over tens or hundreds of kilometres along a certain trend. So there could be more around.
28:16 I don't think it's that big a claim. We clearly see some geophysical and topographical break at Luton Cellar. And it seems to be, whether it's true rifting brittle expansion or whether it's more extension, that's kind of splitting hairs, but there is some sort of extension or rifting zone there. Certainly on the Biram Peninsula, does it continue through? That's not really for Northern Shield. That's more for the survey ultimately to determine 1 day, but as explorators, you've got to run with the ball. You cannot always go in trying to prove, I don't want to say academic points, but real detail. At some place you have to run with the ball. So it seemed to extend across, and now that we are seeing on that local scale, dikes, other intrusions and structures that match that projection, it gives us more confidence. Yes, we are right. Whatever we had at Root & Sell or that rift or whatever you want to call it, does continue across.
29:18 Maybe Bethama gets over there and says, yes, it's influencing the gabbro and maybe Nickel intrusion, but it seems that structure does continue across. But to actually track it underneath Placentia Bay, that's not for us. But we have enough confidence in what we're seeing now on the geophysics on Cape St. Mary's that we do see rock types that are now filling those exact same orientations as the rift that we see at Boonton Cellar. And there are other structures that may be more important, at least on surface, in the Buren. Like clear these East-North-East structures, you see them more visually. They seem to be controlling at least the surface expression of both the Gold and the Copper trends. So I think the rift is real.
30:09 At the end of the day, is it controlling the pore-free and the epithermal Gold as much as the other structures? We don't know, but I think it's real. And often you want to follow these rift structures because they're big dilating zones and they're excellent place for mineralization. Great. And I know you mentioned it, but I'd love if you could just give me a bit more colour and information about the nickel potential at Cape St. Mary's. Well it's a tough one because you know when people want to go and explore for Nickel, the Avalon terrain, the Appalachian is not a classic place, but they do occur in these types of rocks occasionally from time to time. There are examples in BC where you have Nickel occurrences in similar sort of rocks, but it's not the classic terrain. But the bottom line is, you know, there's till samples there that have, they're exactly coincident, elevated copper, elevated nickel and elevated cobalt.
31:01 And so that's telling you there's a magnetic source. You can't, if it was strictly nickel, you could argue, well, it's just coming from what's called ultramafic rock. There's olivine, which makes up a lot of ultramafic rocks, and even some gabbros, contains nickel, but it's not nickel sulfide.
